This maybe a noob or complicated question and apologize in advance if this may find you a dumb question to ask but i just want to know the history of how the Merit spread in the forum.
The question doesn't look stupid and what I remember about Merit being first enforced was in 2018 for everyone on this forum.
Secondly, in relation to the title of the topic, I was told that Merit system was introduced by Theymos and my first thought then was, did Theymos hold thousand of Merit when the merit system was implemented and distributed it to the pioneer of this forum? or is he have a merit source key people to do the job? or when the merit system implemented all of the users that time got rewarded some automatically?
When the merit system was implemented in 2018, some people who were already at a certain rank such as Member, Full Member, Senior Member and so on, obviously got a limited amount of merit automatically in their respective accounts. Examples include Senior Member rank which automatically has 20 to 25 smerits in their account at that time, as well as higher rank such as Hero Member. So it is automatically in their respective accounts when merit is applied to this forum.