Quote from: fillippone on Today at 06:24:23 AM

Quote from: Daniel91 on Today at 06:19:36 AM

I used to get spam messages in my inbox from unknown new members begging me for merits and sometimes it really becomes a burden.

Well, this is weird.
I rarely get this kind of messages.
Either or I am not particularly supportive of newbie, so they don’t even bother trying to message me, or on the contrary i always help voluntarily, so they don’t even bother to message me.
Who knows!!

In regards to the random newbies in my mailbox, a few times a year for me too... .. frequently I had run into them in another thread.. and sure it could be annoying, and maybe some peeps calculate that a few times a year is overly burdensome.. I don't welcome it.. and either I ignore, report or maybe once in a while I will review posts, depending on context.. I had a few over the years that just repeated over and over.. and sure that is a bit annoying.. and even a couple of times could end up causing me to just report.. because some levels of begging should just be obviously outside of acceptability..

sometimes there can be some dilemmas participating on a forum, and especially if there is any kinds of attempts to account for the situations of others, yet of course, some members may well not know that there is likely to be a decent amount of skepticism in terms of interacting with members until running across some of their public posts and if they are involved in forum threads that are of mutual interests, then it might even be more difficult to getting to know such members.

Of course, there are some forum members who invite PMs, and personally, I tend to NOT be very excited or receptive to PMs absent some rationale that makes sense.. and even then, frequently there might not be a need for the PM interactions, from my point of view...

oh by the way, don't get me wrong.. some things might be too personal or potentially explosive to get into publicly.. and even sometimes, there might be some desire not to back off a position that was taken in public, but maybe to explain the position to the member via private message.. so yeah.. sometimes there are decently good reasons to get into private messages, so even though I am not necessarily going to list what I would consider acceptable, some of us do have a sufficient level of common sense regarding the boundaries, and there might even be some abilities to go a wee bit beyond boundaries without really becoming annoying or "burdensome".. on reflection.. some of the interactions via PM as compared to public interactions can be a wee bit funny, strange and/or ironic over the years.. and might even inform a bit about another member but not necessarily be repeated in public (except maybe just in the abstract like I am attempting to do here).. (whether good, bad, ugly, burdensome or otherwise.. hahahahaha)...

Quote from: fillippone on Today at 10:56:36 AM

Quote from: Ratimov on Today at 07:20:59 AM

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Very sad to know.
I did noticed, doing my usual [META] analysis for the Italian board, that the Russian board had a few problems in terms of post and merits in the last months.
I guessed it has to do with the ongoing situation, and also thought the interaction between Russian speaking users, if I may, could become more difficult.

Sorry to hear the tone in the community caused you to leave.
I think it is a net loss for the forum.

For sure, I don't always agree with Ratimov.. and for sure, there is value to differing perspectives and there are also value to being able to figure out some kind of a pace that is workable.. and gosh, it may well be difficult to understand how some aspects of the forum might start to feel too toxic and/or intolerable.. but for me war is one thing.. so getting involved in politics can be problematic.. and surely my issues with shitcoins could cause me to not want to participate.. .oh and god damned meta issues can sometimes be irritating.. even though sometimes any of us could get sucked into them.. . so for me, some of my preferences to focus on bitcoin has helped some of my sanity and ability to sustain posting and participating in the forum in ways that I feel to be beneficial for my own knowledge and psychology. ... but yeah, if the participation becomes too burdensome, then I can surely relate to that...

Otherwise, I agree with you fillippone that the loss of a previously proactive and thoughtful merit source (even if we might not agree with everything) does seem to be a loss for the forum.. and of course, theymos does not seem to assign too many new merit source members.. and there are likely a decent number of merit source members.. maybe double the number of merit source members?

I feel kind of privileged to have a decent amount of time that I can spend on forum activities, yet I can surely understand how some members could either become burned out or even begin to consider the giving out of merits to be a wee bit too burdensome and not fitting in their own ways that they would prefer to spend their time. Sometimes it can be difficult to read some posts and to figure out if they are "merit worthy" from our own perspective (no I am not even suggesting that there is necessarily an objective standard exactly.. even though there may well be some overlapping of ideas in regards to what is "merit worthy"..). and several of us know that sometimes we might even perceive our own systems for sending out smerits to be inadequate or to be making mistakes or maybe even sucking us into parts of the forum (or threads or even reading some posts more than once to figure out if we want to send it an smerit) that are not pleasurable for us on a personal preference basis.. and even some members may well not like the way that we send out smerits.. and even find various angles of our personality to be not very likable.. and I don't even claim to like myself sometimes.. except during the times that I do.. -that's meant to be kind of a joke.. hahahaha..

Any of us can be irritating and irritable (whether a merit source or not).. and sure there are some members who are always likable too.. and I am not even sure if that is a good thing.. .. so in that sense, there seems to be some value in mixing up the types of merit source members.. or if there is a system and if there might be burn out and if there might be needs to remove some merit sources (maybe even yours truly) if it seems that they might have left the reservation.. if there is such a thing as being on the reservation within the meaning of the expression?.. .I know that there is some attempts at creating a kind of sustainable system here.. kind of like open source.. and decentralized.. but then each of us are humans (at least in theory).. so then in that regard, we have our various central points of failure in a variety of possible ways.. not only meat or mental-wagon related. even though those two are likely the bigger of the categories.. .

Quote from: Ratimov on Today at 02:19:25 PM

Quote from: fillippone on Today at 10:56:36 AM

I did noticed, doing my usual [META] analysis for the Italian board, that the Russian board had a few problems in terms of post and merits in the last months.

As you correctly noted, the Russian locale has some problems in terms of posts, but it cannot be said that there are problems with merit. In the Russian locale, there are still 3 active Merit Sources, with a total of 2 000 Merit available for distribution every month. This is a lot, given that posting in this place has been greatly reduced. Therefore, some Merit Sources do not always give away their 30-day quota in full for a simple reason: there is simply nowhere to distribute them, unless you increase the average value of the given merit per post. In the Russian locale, there has always been the most merit sources and the most distributed merit, among all locales.

I saw this and therefore redirected some of my resources to locales where the situation is somewhat worse, for example, to Turkish or Indonesian locales, where, in my opinion, one more merit source was missing.

I must be living in fantasyland.

I thought that most of the smerits were distributed on the WO thread. One thread hogging all (most) of the smerit distribution....

Surely, it is good for any merit source to go beyond their usual stomping grounds, but sometimes merit sources do not want to go outside of their usual areas.. and I can see why those members might start to feel somewhat stuck.. .. So what is the solution? I would imagine that theymos has some ideas about threshold considerations. and maybe some ideas about source merit adjustments that could be made.. even though the last time that he made an adjustment about a year ago (and did it not take more than 1.5 years between that adjustment and the previous adjustment?) seemed to have just been a kind of blanket increase for a lot of the merit source members, even though I cannot either remember details or even remember if I ever knew many of the details (even at that time) regarding how that last adjustment played out.

Quote from: _BlackStar on Today at 04:57:02 PM

Quote from: tranthidung on Today at 03:36:32 PM

I meant good posters deserve to rank up. Fast or slow, it depends on their contributions but if they don't actually make excellent contents, merit they received should be equal to their contribution quality.

Mate, I understand what you're trying to say, but actually I don't expect your suggestion to be the basis for lowering the percentage of sMerit distributed monthly to deserving users. I mean don't make people wait any longer to rank up if they have a good initiative to improve the quality of their posts. But of course the quality will determine the amount of merit they will get, it should be fair to see.

I don't understand why some of us think that the good initiative of low ranking users to get merit on their posts is a reason to call it merit-fishing initiative. I don't know what the problem is, it's a viewpoint that is now starting to be heard more often when there are some low-ranking users trying to rank up and get merit in their posts. Good initiative should be rewarded rather than them forever being spammers, but it should be worth the effort. I would not say that they are merit-fishing because even if it is true, then we are only encouraging them to improve themselves and post quality.

Actually it is true that some members will get better in their post quality with the passage of time, and surely some members might well be trying to earn merits, and I can see why you may well consider the term "fishing for merit" to be derogatory, and maybe even presuming way more bad intentions upon the newbie (or the lower ranking member) than such member deserves. So yeah, sometimes merit sources may well expect members to have to jump through way too many hoops before sending any smerits.

It seems to be good that there are a variety of standards that merit source members have in terms of quality of posts that they expect; however, it does seem to be the case that merit source members will end up getting eliminated and/or reduced if their smerit sending policy ends up resulting in not using their 30-day supply on a regular basis.. absent some reasonable explanation for such..

Surely the infrequencies of global adjustments to the smerit system including quantity of merit source members and quantity of smerits within the hands of merit source members could cause some reasonable inference speculation that theymos practices a decent amount of hands off in the whole matter.. even though I would imagine that he has some decent tools to look into some of the specifics to the extent that might be needed.. and maybe some kinds of adjustments that might be needed might not really be in the bailiwick of other members to report either, because sometimes it can be difficult for other members to recognize some smerit spending/sending patterns that might exist.. and whether theymos might consider those smerit sending patterns to be problematic in terms of how smerits might be sent out and whether some members might be overly stingy or overly generous.... and from my own speculation on the matter, absent perhaps some reports of abuse (if they can be identified) it seems that theymos may well end up acting more in response to evidence of overly stingy rather than evidence of overly generous.