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I have gone through lot of post that are complaining about merits. Basically most of them are spammers only that are making hue and cry. One of their cheif complaint is that earlier user got free pass in this forum.

Merit system is now in place for approximately 2 months and I think it is time to correct this free pass system also.

I think we should start decaying Default Merits in constant rate, let say decay of 4 Default Merits every week. So it means
after implementing this system users who have Default Merit will see decay of 4 Default Merits per week until the user Default Merit become zero. The rank of user in forum will be determined by the sum of the current Default Merits + Merits earned. (Offcourse I am not ignoring activity).

Since decay of default merit is 4 merit/week , so it means Legendary have 250 weeks (around 5 years to earn 1000 merits points). Hero will have 125 weeks , Full Member have 25 weeks, Member will have 3 weeks.

This new system will challenge users to justify their  ranks and we can proudly say that no one has got free pass.

Actually this system will pose real challenge to those people who got ranks by shit posting before the implementation of Merit system. Since decay of Default Merits will be gradual so it should not affect the constructive user in this forum.

PS: When I used word "Default Merits", I am pointing to those Merits that user got by virtue of their forum rank at the time of implementation of the Merit System. In my post I am just suggesting to decay Default Merits only, sMerits that are already  generated due to these Default Merits will not be impacted.


Edit: ( I added below points in response to concerns of the user)
Concern1:
That wouldn't be fair with people who are participating in this forum for years, but now they are not posting too much. It wouldn't be fair if they lose their rank.

Response: Merit do not put restrictions on meriting the old post of the user.

Concern2: Old user are not posting too much now
Response : Then isteadof decaying 8 default merit in 2 weeks, tie the 8 merits to activity, if user gains 14 activity, he will lose 8 default merit.

Concern 3: Another drawback I can think of is that currently merit sources and legendary members (who have high smerits) are actually seeking out and rewarding lower ranked members to help them rank up. If they were worried about their own ranks, their behaviour would be different.
Response : If you look closely the merit stats, they do not suggest that legendary and hero member are not getting merits.
           Individuals are awarding merit according to their taste or principles and I do not think they are seeing rank            before awarding Merits (excluding Merit abuser).

And to replace those threads, we'll get a whole new slew of people whining about how they not just can't even maintain their existing ranks due to the decay and then talk about how their signature earnings are going down (implying they deserve it anyway) but anyway I highly doubt it would be added since it would create more problems than it would solve instead just wait out the current spam, slowly and steadily most of the current shitposters will get phased out as they fail to adapt and then the system would slowly laxen (ie merit sources would increase, they get a more concentrated feed of good content rather than having to find one good post out of 100s of shitposts, etc)

That wouldn't be fair with people who are participating in this forum for years, but now they are not posting too much. It wouldn't be fair if they lose their rank.

I agree there are many spammers with Hero/legendary accounts, but this kind of rule could harm legit old users.

Merit system not putting any restrictions in meriting old posts so there old post can be merited.
I think many of the old legit user are now inactive accounts.
This  system will create unrest on old spammers only.
 I do not think anybody using this forum for gaining and sharing knowledge will be impacted (with exception of serious Discussions/Ivory Tower), everybody got same right in this forum.
Avatar and signature restrictions does not mean anything as I do not think they are getting used for sharing and gaining information or knowledge.

You are missing the point that people in this forum have a life and not all people can be on the forum at all time, what if they have to be offline for a long time?

Come on just take it that the old member invested their time sooner on this forum while you were not, and that is your fault, it is just the same as you cant blame people who got into bitcoin sooner than you.

May be you are right, but Account farming ,shit posting and plagiarism does not look  "investment of time" to me.
Why someone who is not using this forum actively will be bothered about the rank?

Even active users may be busy for a week, a month, or whatever time due to life, work or just a general break from their online lives. Doesn't make them shitposters, account farmers or people who do not care about the forum.

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It's generally human nature to be more pissed about losing something they already have over something they didn't have being harder to get. Like I mentioned in my previous reply this would just end up creating more problems. What I can see working is implementing this after say a year when the whole drama has stabilised and there's enough merit sources to balance out the number of merits getting pumped out of the system

This might not be a bad proposal, but whiners will continue to whine. Even if this is implemented, you cannot stop spammers from complaining about how the current legendary members have another X years to justify their rank, while they have been blocked from progressing up.

Another drawback I can think of is that currently merit sources and legendary members (who have high smerits) are actually seeking out and rewarding lower ranked members to help them rank up. If they were worried about their own ranks, their behaviour would be different.

Seems like this guy is just feeling upset because he didn't get a high rank before the implemention of the  merit system so if he had problems with earning merits then it will be fair if the existing high ranked users will also get some pain in the ass with decaying merit. Just like that. Without a single world describing why it should be better for the furum discusions.
It was always easier to sort the high ranked members. Just because they had to survive much more time on this forum without spamming and making any shady stuff. Otherwise they could be taged and the acc rank became useless. The cummunity works fine in most cases.

And then what? It's already been 2 months after the implementation of the merit system and up until now we could see a lot of forum members bitching about it. To think that your idea would help the cause of those user, will just result more chaos in the forum. It will only make things worst and most moderators already have their hands full on how to make better implementation of the merit system. Just let those new users be, it is not our fault that we had an early priviledge in joining the forum first.

Not a bad idea OP. This will really help purge the shitposters, how would you deal with member ranks? Would a legendary move down if he didn't maintain the required merits?

This would be a decent way of purging the shitposters from every level

I'm pretty sure I remember theymos posting that he would not consider any system that leads to people getting de-ranked. So the only way this would be implemented would result in people having a Merit score less than their rank requires.



I'm coming round to the idea that employing more moderators and getting a lot stricter on shitposting is the only way to clear them out of here.

This actually could be the best idea I have read until today on how to repair merit system. I would merit you if I had any :)

That system wouldn't work. It wouldn't stop the sig spammers from preserving their rankings through mutual support, and the forum would lose some valuble members. Some of the hard working mods don't seem to make many posts for example.

I'm starting to think that we should have a member rating system of say 1-10, and members can decide on the level below which they can ignore the members posts. This would be independent of the activity, merit and post count.

There should also be a language ability check for posters to be able to post on specific language boards, including English. If you can't speak French, then you shouldn't be posting on the French language boards for example.

Restricting new/junior members to certain boards would be another great help to preserve the usability of some of the boards.

Au contraire, it would force the spammers to show their hand and risk revealing themselves, if they send merit to each other. In any case, they would have only the initial smerit to play around with.

The forum would not lose any members, their ranks might come down a bit. If you look at the OP's proposed rate of decay, it would take more than 2 years of not doing anything for a legendary to drop to senior.



This pretty much nixes the idea. But otherwise, the concept is sound. Of course, my biggest argument is that we may not have enough merit getting generated to go around, especially if all members feel the need to collect it.

I would agree with that and theymos has gradually been turning the tap further on.


That's been gradually increased since 35 sources at the start. It's just my personal guestimate but I think those numbers need to be doubled to make it really work well.

Not if they were intelligent enough to vary the amounts, and mixed up the awarders. Don't forget that the initial sMerit is effectively doubled if it is kept in circulation. It wouldn't need much of a boost from addition merit awards to nullify the concept.

You would start to lose members if they started to be deranked. I'd find it insulting if my rank was dropped, and I would seriously consider restricting my board presence to lurker/reader.

Please have a look at my analysis (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3078328.msg32604134#msg32604134) with data from less than 2 weeks ago (let's say the Merit system was about 6 weeks old at that time). To "survive" the rate of Merit decay you suggested, people would need to have earned at least 24 Merit in those 6 weeks. This is a very rough estimate, but that doesn't matter for the point I'm trying to make: Only 849 users had earned that much Merit, which includes the "spike" of Merit right after the introduction.
If you would put the Merit decay at 1 per month, 7605 users qualify.

In short, taking away 4 Merit per week is too much.

Disclaimer: my numbers include Newbies and Jr. Members who earned Merit without receiving free Merit. I didn't correct for this.

I can’t see merit decay linked to a timeframe being fair on those users who, for example, post seldomly but have in the past been good contributors. Personal circumstances change and people’s free time and willingness to post will vary over time.

Being demoted as a possible outcome of the proposed merit decay system is a feeling much harder to digest that not being promoted.

Regardless, the Merit system doesn´t even generate enough merit on average per user to withstand a drop in 4 merits per week:

https://i.imgur.com/jViFNG5.jpg

The weekly average sMerit assigned per Merited User within the week is around 4. if we exclude the initial exceptional weeks. So basically, your idea will on average take away all merit gained. And that is for those that do gain merit.

In fact, The amount uf users that are merited each week for the past 9 weeks is only 13,61% (of those merited at all). That would mean that all remaining users will start a slow pilgrimage towards demotion...

https://i.imgur.com/5rXUqiT.jpg

Note: Data tables derived from this weeks raw data merit.txt file.

I'd be intereted to know how many individual members I have awarded with merit, and how that compares with the other merit awarders. Is that info fairly easy to discover?

I think that could be more interesting than the total amount awarded.

Well, really the total amount above is proof that, on average, substracting 4 sMerit per week would render the system useless as basically only a selected few would maintain rank over time.



I checked what you asked for in the latest sMerit.txt raw data file (data included for sMerit given between the 24/01/2018 and the 23/03/2018). Your stats:

- Number of times sMerit is given:                 193
- Number of distinct users you gave it to:       156
- Total sMerit awarded:                                 209
- Average awarded per user:                         1,34 sMerits
- Position when compared to other sMerit awarders (ordered by sMerit average descending): 5.333 (there are 47,20% sMerit awarders who award more per user than you, but you distribute well amongst multiple users).

You can see the complete file per user here (your data is on row 5334): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d6M7ULKoefxF-VnYriIZ_if1gXjmT4PM3UuOMMbL530/edit?usp=sharing (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d6M7ULKoefxF-VnYriIZ_if1gXjmT4PM3UuOMMbL530/edit?usp=sharing)

Enjoy..

In reference to the OP, why not just make a new rank at 10000 merit that no one yet has and see if anyone will reach it? Rather than demoting everyone that has already worked hard to get to their level on the forum (and also, the people who have bought accounts who our admins don't actually condemn in any way).

Also:
Imagine how long it'll take for everyone to get up to the ranks the were originally at.
I don't get merited very often, I wouldn't say I have a low amount of merit, but I don't get merited that often or with very much. This, to get back up to legendary at this rate would take a few years (although, if everyone was of a lower rank then people might be more favourable to merit my posts as currently meriting them is more of a +1 rather than anything as there isn't really a point for legendaries to get merit rather than the dopamine rush when you spot you've got a merit - I know I do need to get out more sometimes).
Also what would the companies advertising for signature campaigns do? Since I have bought my copper membership there'd still be a lot of advanced space in my signature, but I'd already be outranked by lower users who have their merit earning up because they're looked at more favourable to give merit to because they have actually needed it in order to rank up - and no one would be above sr member so services would be limited on what they are actually able to advertise.

That's a nice collection of information. Well done Jet Cash also for decentralising your merit awards between multiple users (as I think the system should be).

According to that sheet, I'm at 7,7,8,1.14 (or was when the data was scraped anyway).

Merit was introduced to stop spammers from ranking up. Introducing new ranks has been suggested before, but has nothing to do with the reason Merit was created.

Nice data collection! I was still working on an answer to this question, but you beat me to it. I'll post mine in my own merit analysis (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3078328.new#new) once it's done. Update: here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3078328.msg33170488#msg33170488).

Yes. I’ve posted a few myself. There’s quite a bit that can be done with what’s currently available, although rank should be in the raw data as that is an essential dimension to interesting data break-down. I’ve seem some user’s manage to get hold of this info but it’s probably by querying forum externally with the inherent risk of being banned..

If taking away 4 Default/free Merit per week from an experienced user is too much than how we able to justify for newbie to gain approx. 7 merits per week to get upto rank of Sr. Member


I think so it will motivate everybody to write sensibly. Might be  we should increase Merit requirement to 50-60 for member and 25 for Jr.Member . Legendary will also lose status then if  "Default+ Earned" Merits < 1000.

You are constructive poster so I do not think it will affect you. But that is the whole point of this system,fear of rank drop will never give you liberty to gain activity via shit posting.

To be honest, I don't really think that merits will be decayed somehow. It is unrealistic. In the ANN about merit system (published by Theymos), merit scores will be attached with each user forever, they won't lose them in any situation.
Instead, I think that sMerits might be decayed in the future if users won't actively use their sMerits. In fact, users will earn nothing by hoarding their sMerit as Theymos, forum admin stated. sMerits has been here to send constructive users as small rewards to give them motivation to keep contributing to the forum. And users should comprehensively understand about the original objective of sMerits.

Pretty bad idea, people deserve rights not to participate in merit system if they willing to do so. If one is happy with his rank, why can't he stay at it forever? Just leave this merit system alone without this constant "improvements" suggestion. Need at least 1 year timeframe to evaluate its impact on the forum.

What should really start decaying is sMerits as it was planned by Theymos. Need to encourage people to give away their sMerits.

Bumping this today.
I saw Theymos demoted Jr. Member and increased merit Sources. (More chances of getting merit now).
I think we can take one more step for those who are still spamming and got rank earlier before start of the Merit system.