Here are my ideas and suggestions to inspire users to spend their smerits. Now any user could rank up when they earned desired merits; of course, they need to reach activity requirements. I am preferring to add something like activities. Users need to spend their smerits as well to achieve the ranks.
For example, to become a Hero member, a user needs to earn 500 merits. On the other hand, he also has 250 spendable merits. On the current system, even a user who doesn't spend any smerits will rank up. So we can do something on that. Users must be forced to spend their smerits as well to reach the next rank. If he/she needs 500 merits for Hero rank, he/she also needs to spend 250 merits to achieve Hero rank. I don't think it's necessary to add any additional option for user profiles since each user can see how many spendable merits they have. This is my first suggestion; if theymos think it's reasonable, he could implement it.
This sounds good in principle, but in practice it is not a good idea at all. While there are different problems with the merit system from what I also gather after reading some of the discussion topics on it, this would not solve it. I would have to either give way too much merit for each post or I would need to follow around a few distinguished members of this forum like gmaxwell, NotATether, d5000 and others to keep giving them merit until I exhaust my balance.
Putting aside technical details or the structure of the system, there are two
of the biggest problems that I
seehave seen.
OneThe first one is an imbalance in distribution or concentration of merit giving in certain boards
as reported in another thread, and
the other is a lack of meritable posts.