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The initial Merit/Smerit airdrop, as we call it here, was twofold:
1. When the Merit System
Kicked-off in late January 2018, all existing accounts were given the amount of Merits that equated their rank’s requirement under the Merit System. So if an account was a Sr. Member, it was awarded 250 Merits, a Hero Member 500 merits, and so forth. The idea was to keep things consistent, and have all pre-merit ranks be coherent with rank requirements upon introducing the Merit System. The other option, I figure, would have been to have all accounts start from scratch again, option that was discarded in any case.
Note that, at the said time, Jr. Members did not require any Merits for their rank, and thus did not receive any in the so call airdrop. The 1 Merit requirement for Jr. Members
was introduced in September 2018 to try to curb the spam on the forum.
2. In addition, accounts were airdropped a certain amount of sMerits (those that are actually sendable when meriting a post), which were different for each person, and depended on their Activity over the prior year (roughly) and their rank. Members and upwards were awarded these sMerits to get the ball rolling, as per this post:
While specific formula is not given, theymos wrote that the initial sMerit is not solely determined by rank, but determined by rank and activity points obtained in the last year.
The exact formula was:
yearActivity = activity in the last ~year, max 378
freeMerit = the merit (not sMerit) you started with
modifier =
0.1 if member
0.2 if full member
0.25 if sr member
0.35 if hero
0.4 if legendary
return (yearActivity/378) * modifier * freeMerit
So the most you could get is if you were a Legendary who maxed out your activity points in the last year, in which case you would get 1 * 0.4 * 1000 = 400 sMerit.
Note that I later made an adjustment giving 500 extra merit to some hero members, but no extra sMerit was given here.
I'll probably publish a dump of the initial sMerit at some point.
On top of that,
Merit sources were introduced in order to create a new inflow of sMerits in the system. Some were initially appointed, and others were later added either after postulating as candidates, or being selected for the task. The number of sources changes from time to time, as sources are sometimes removed and/or added. Their infividual 30 day sMerit allowance also gets revised every now and then, and may increase or decrease over time.
Last but not least, once the Merit System started to roll, every 2 Merits that get added to your counter generate 1 sMerit to sent to others.