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I don't keep track of bans while Meriting, but
based on this list I've been lucky in the past 180 days
I'm surprised to see so little Merit sent to banned users, that list used to be a lot longer.
I have checked the list and found that 30 users sent merit to permabanned users. Some of them may not realize it or they sent it intentionally for various reasons, ABCbits and fillippone lead the list by sending 54 and 14 merit. I personally am not surprised why the list is not as long as before, one of the reasons I would say is because many users can actually recognize users who have been permabanned because of the tools they use and some others because of changes in behavior or changes in mindset where they only want to distribute to active users so that it remains in circulation.
Like this one:
[β] BPIP Extension: user info & extra features add-on/extension, Firefox/Chrome
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I don't see any problem with sending merit to banned accounts as it is for high quality posts regardless of the account status.
But priority will be given to unbanned accounts as that means 0.5 sMerit that may be available.
I also don't mind it so far, it's because every sender has their own reasons why they need to send merit to that user and one of them is as an appreciation for quality posts as you said. In the list of Top senders to permabanned users, last 180 days it seems you are in 5th place out of 30 users by sending 4 merit to permabanned users.