A couple of top, notable members are quite active on the beginners' board. And should be credited for it.

I often see a lot of high rank members who answers repeated questions all over again,

I barely visit the Dutch board, but I assume you mean the Dutch bounty/altcoin boards, right? Those have heavy spam all over the forum, not just in Dutch.

The Merit system works on all boards, what do you mean by introducing it for local boards?

Big part of the accounts are sold and then the seller is trying to get it back as he has the signed address in the list and claiming that the account was hacked. That's why there should be an "investigation" for each case.

Personally, I used to report every bumped topic older than 3 months. I don't see why should a discussion be made after such long period.
If an old topic contains genuine information and is very important to the community then it is ok. Other topics have to be used as a reference in a new topic (season 2 somehow).

Mods can't win a war against machines (aka bots).
Even if they focus on the section of the forum, bots will change the section of the forum and the spam will start again, we need a restriction on the start of the problem and not on the end.

Of course, after some interaction between the people, seniors members are used to merit those ones whose posts they find to be qualified for the task. Of course, this is a matter of probability: if you have been in here for a long time, and you are active and aware of the forum issues and circumstances, that's more probable for you to write something of use to the community. This is fairly normal, then, that senior users are the more rewarded ones.

But it doesn't mean that there are personal preferences,

in fact, newbies should be more rewarded, for there are many people out there just looking for some newbies to reward. The problem is that there are few, actually, deserving it.

I have being trying all possible best to make it work on having just a merit but it seems everything not working and my account is more than 5months old.

Please what other methods can I use to achieve this because I'm about to give up?

Just wondering are you admins allowing people or freelancers to get paid via Merit if the client doesnt have money and can only pay using his Merit? or this will result into an instant ban? Please let us know to avoid violation.

it is likely this activity will get noticed by some default trust members who will proceed to red tag the accounts.

The big question is who will monitor the post?

Hi XFactor,
There are three possible theories on someone who have not earned any merit more than 9 months till the launch day of merit system:
- They are spammers. During the 9-month period, they kept posting/ spamming; and have not contributed anything deserves merits.
- They have been totally inactive during the 9-month period.
- They are service providers, such as mining pools, Escrow services, bounty managers, etc. Those sort of users mostly hard to get merits.

So, the figures above are only for reference. We need to have a forensic analysis with a bit deeper analysis to be able to really discover the facts.

jr. member - 1 merit,
member - 11 merits,
full member - 101 merits,
senior member - 251 merits,
hero member - 501 merits,
legendary - 1001 merits

[Merit Analysis] Users ranked Sr. Member & up that have not earned any merit
Moreover, there are lots of Hero and Ledgendary have not earned any merit.

The percentage of users at Member, Full Member, Senior Member, Hero, and Ledgendary have not earned any merits till October of 2018 are 83%, 82.6%, 79.8%, 73.3%, and 47.2%, respectively. Amongst all ranks, Ledgendary is a outstanding one with nearly 47% of them have not received any merit. Ranks from Member to Senior Member (even with Hero Member) are almost the same.
Detailed statistics given below.
~
I don't want to fall into arguments there, but it's something like unfair system, even for lower-ranks, of course above Junior Member rank.
Do you agree at this point?
How fair the forum and merit system, rank system are if someone started as a Newbie and get 100 merits to rank up to Full Member rank. In another case, someone who is a Full Member and will not get any merit over the next one year, will be able to stay at Full member, forever.
It will become more clearly unfair for higher ranks, such as Senior, Hero and Ledgendary ranks.

Outside the forum, in real life, in some nations, there are strict requirements on professors, associate professors that they have to satisfy strict criteria, which require them to have new contribution, new project, new published scientific articles during speficic period in order to be as Professors / Associate professors. If they can satisfy those criteria, they will be demoted (as Junior Member rank witnessed weeks ago in the forum).

But it really isn't hard. People shouldn't have to just make one good post and then they're good to go. Any idiot can do that, and once they have it they then don't have to bother making any more good posts because Christmas has come early for them. They can just go back to shitposting again, so that's why they should have to demonstrate they're not a one-hit wonder and can make a handful of decent posts. This is why I would argue we should make the requirement ten merit, and I actually think it will make things easier for everyone. People will be more liberal with their merits and so users are more likely to get merited, and shitposters won't be able to abuse the system as easy. When one merit is all you need to earn here people become weary about giving that user a license to get paid, and making one solitary good post really isn't enough to measure their capability especially when you can just beg, buy or trade the merit quite easily.

Think of it this way:

Let's say you have a colleague at work. This colleague has been there for a while - say twelve months. They aren't a good worker. They don't pull their weight and in meetings they generally just repeat the same meaningless nonsense over and over again, getting in the way of actual conversation and progress. They are rude, abrasive and obnoxious. Every time that they've spoken to you it has been to either bad mouth another colleague or try to sell you some bath bomb from the multi-level marketing scam they are involved in.

Suddenly and out of the blue, after a year or more of being lazy and rude, one morning this colleague starts being really friendly with you and offering to do some of your workload. What is your initial thought? "Wow, they are a better person now - I know, I'll go buy them a coffee and some doughnuts"? Of course not. You would be immediately suspicious and wonder what thing or favor they want from you.

Now, lets say that person is friendly to everyone and works hard all day and asks for nothing in return. And then does it again the next day. And for the rest of the week. And for the rest of the month. After a while you think "Finally this person has turned over a new leaf", and you start inviting them along to your Friday evening post-work drinks.

Merit is the same. One good post is not enough to erase months and months of shitposting, especially when it is obvious that as soon as the newbie gets that one merit they are desperate for, they will just go back to shitposting again. If you show a sustained change over weeks and months, then as has been pointed out already, merit will come your way.

I was going to send you 1 Merit for this post but I checked out your post history & it’s littered with Bounty Hunting spam so I’m not going to now, sorry.

You’ll never rank up if the majority of your posts are in that shit hole of the forum. More posts like this though & you’ll rank up.

I think it’d be much better if 10 Merit’s were required to rank up to Junior. I’m in a pickle here because that post is Meritable imo but I don’t want to be responsible for somebody earning money from the forum if they constantly post in Bounty threads.
If 10 was required I would definitely have Merited him.

but I think Juniors should have their signatures removed completely and you only get one until you get ten merit and become a Member.

Many here ignore the fact that the accounts of this forum have its value "because of the possibility of getting money from the signatures campaigns" so selling it and then claiming to be hacked is a beneficial policy.

The process of restoring these accounts requires careful investigation of their own and then access to the sensitive data to be restored.

Prevention is better than cure

This has been mentioned so many times, but it is still prolific, and it includes Heroes and Legendaries who really should know better.

When I run into this I do 2 things. I try to educate them, by directing them to a topic I created [Tips] Posting technique

I'm on here for long enough stretches browsing at times where there is no discussion I want to be a part of atm, so I take a minute or two.

SMF has the option to remove nested quotes. Do you think it would be beneficial if this was implemented here?