Bitcoin Forum

Let me start by saying that the new system seems to work in some parts of bitcointalk forum and not so much in others.
I want to discuss here the issues I notice in romanian board. And this is not only my opinion.
There are plenty of good topics there and useful answers, but they don't get any merit.

First I thought that the people don't know about the system or simply don't give a damn. But this is not the case, people know and care about merit points. The reason is a different one; there are almost no sMerit points to give there.
Most of the high rank members (I wanted to say all, but I don't know them all :)) have the exact number of merit points according to their rank minimum requirements. That means they didn't earn any after the system was instated, so they don't actually have any sMerit points. As far as I understood the default merit points don't carry sMerit points,  right?

It looks like there is no merit source in romanian board, so nobody can get any points just by posting there. And it looks that most of the users there do not post elsewhere, or at least not often enough or not good enough to get some merits.
The system seems to focus almost exclusively on english posts and boards, there are almost all of the merit sources (except for russian and turkish boards, but we all know what happens there :D). And these sources cannot and would not check romanian posts for obvious reasons.

Far from me the idea of candidating for the position of merit source, obviously I don't qualify for such a role, but somebody has to take this position. There is a romanian board, so there must be a romanian merit source (at least). And the same for any language specific boards.
So,  how can we solve this?

I hope me English is good enough to make my ideas understood. Feel free to correct me if i did any language or grammar mistakes. :D

If that is really the case, then maybe you guys should apply to be a merit source.
But, is there is really no merit sources in Romanian board?

I cannot say that for sure, but I didn't see any. I mean I saw merit points given, but you can count them all using your fingers, that's how many they are in the whole forum. I am not in the position to know if there is or there isn't a merit source for romanian forum, but maybe one of the admins can answer this question.

They do, just much less than organically received merit. If I remember correctly, there was this user with 100 default merit points and 4 smerit.

almost d every thread talks about merit because it's so hard to get it, so what's the way out so we can get merit?

I can't speak about Romanian board, but I noticed something similar in main boards of bitcointalk. It's obvious that so many users still not aware about merit system. There are thousands of members, even with hero or legendary ranks who haven't sent/received any merit in these few weeks.
Actually, I think it's a good idea to have merit source on every local board. Otherwise, users who can't write in English hardly can get merit from other users if there are no merit source on that board.

Only way to get merit - make good quality posts. Simple enough, right?

For example there is this topic in the romanian board:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2979514.0

OP obviously spend a lot of time and he created this very detailed topic with anything you need to know when you whant to invest in crypto.
I think that he should be meritet much more that 11 Merit for his work.
I hope that a merit source with some romanian knowlegde will see him and award him.

At least he got some points.
My observation is that good posts in the small local sections don't get enough merit but this is also due to fact that the community is not so big.
Well, since this is an English speaking forum it is understandable that the good non-English threads will be undervalued due to low access to Merit sources or users with sMerit.
Also due to the less control in the local sections much of the points are distributed in not so fair way. People selling merit is not something new. There are threads even in the English section for such trades.