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 like this idea. Thinking about it, one could even remove the requirement to receive 500 merits (in the case of Heros) and only require spending of the 250 sMerits. Because if you can spend 250 sMerits then you will have got 500 merits. This does not have any other effect, but it would mean one variable check less in the forum software.
Another idea is to get back merit rewards. Like spending 2 merits, the receiver will get 1 spendable merit. And the sender will get back 1 merit to their profile.
I like the idea that one coud get 1 sMerit back for each 2 sMerits spent. However, if an user gets also a "profile merit", this would not longer have my support, because this would mean basically that everybody can award merits to themselves, which totally misses the point of the merit system.
Let's have an example: I currently have accumulated more than 2000 sMerits (I'm a merit source, and am also distributing merit but seemingly not fast enough). Now I could simply be very generous during one week and spend all these merits to random people and I would then have almost 1000 merits more ... would this be fair? IMO no.