If you prefer to rank up, you will need to have quality posts, by so doing, your post will be given merit, in every 2 merits you received, you will have 1 smerits which you will be able to send to any other person's post, but which should be of quality as well.
While some spammers can also wait for the pizza celebration day and the annual voting event to earn some accolades from users for their minimal efforts on this forum towards rankings. The behavior has increased year by year and if you check their post history then I bet you will have a hard time finding quality posts.
Those are some of the things that some spammers are starting to like for merit, but regarding rankings then I'm sure the average of them won't make it even after all these years. It all depends on the quality of each user's posts, and if they can meet those requirements then nothing will restrict them from ranking them unless they don't post much.