I hope you know there is a difference between trading merit and giving out merit freely to post’s that is worth it. Trading of merit is disallowed, lots of people’s accounts have been tagged on the forum here just because they were caught sending merits to their alt accounts, which is very wrong. The merits system wasn’t created because they wanted us to be trading our smerit.
It is not disallowed by the forum. Users can do it and theymos said he knows there is dark market and if there is a dark market for merit exchange, he feels fine about it.
Only forum community are against it, discourage it because it will create unfair forum where shit posters can rank up by buying or exchanging merit.
The current status quo seems OK. If you have to pay $20 per merit plus a risk of getting red trust, then that's a situation that doesn't concern me at all. I'm not going to lose sleep over people going to ridiculous lengths to buy merit, since only a small number of people will be willing and able to do that.
As long as merit sales are a black market, I'm happy, since that makes it far more difficult and expensive to buy merit. If that's the case, then the small volume of black-market merit trades don't themselves bother me much, and I think that it does more harm than good to get too witch-hunty about it.
If you see any post that you believe is useful to you or the forum and you think it’s worth meriting, then you can merit it.
It is true according to
Merit & new rank requirements
I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
- Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.
Do not beg for merit excessively.