Bitcoin Forum

Hello members,

I wonder if it would not be a good idea if everyone, depending on their rank, would receive several merits per month to give away.

This would certainly increase the amount of merit distributed and everyone would feel fairer. For sure it would be good for new users who can't reward posts they like because they don't have merits.

I am such a new member and I know what it's like to have no merit for long months and then suddenly have one and a problem to whom to give it.

Just wanted to share my thoughts with you BitcoinTalk members because I didn't find a similar topic or read a similar idea or forum proposal.

What do you think about it? Wouldn't it be good for our forum?

Then there's practically little difference between merit and activity. The whole point of merit is to serve as another limitation for ranking up rather than a time requirement.

IMO, manipulating the number of merit sources to suit the forum's needs for merit will be sufficient.

No, no you get me wrong. Merits but only to award others. If not used in one month they are gone. You will still have to get merits for a quality post by yourself. This will help with merit distribution and give fair chance to everybody to award content they like.

Oh, so everyone gets extra sMerit. I see.

I'm still not on board with the idea though. What's to stop spammers to start mass-registering accounts again and direct the sMerit each account gets per month to one account to rank it up quickly? Merit sources allows us to direct the flow of sMerit to members that we can trust to distribute the merit to deserving posts and not towards malicious purposes.

Then the scammers with multiple alt accounts will receive multiple merits to spread amongst their multiple alt accounts, rank up their multiple alt accounts, and therefore defeat the purpose of the entire system.

This will be easy to check and find. As you know all abusers are sooner or later caught and I am talking only about 2 or 3 merits for small rank and 5 to 8 for higher. Only to give the possibility to award content you like and to help in faster distribution. This will take years to create and farm accounts with this amount of merits and will be easy to find.

You underestimate account farmers - there are some with 50+ accounts. With your proposal, you are now handing 300-800 or more merit a month (once they distribute it back and forth amongst their own accounts) to scammers. And you are then creating more work for DT members or mods (who already have more than enough to deal with) to find and weed out these scammers. All for the sake of "helping with faster distribution". Not worth it.

I did not realize the scale these account farmers operate on. I thought about few connected in a rig accounts max. I was sure that with time biggest ones were hunted down.

There are people who have been caught with 200+ accounts and a bot farmer in the Chinese boards who has probably had thousands banned and is still farming them to this day and doubt he will give up any time soon. All you're doing with this suggestion is making their lives a lot easier by giving them a steady stream of merit income that they can distribute to their alts or "friends" month after month.

Thanks Hillarious, like I said before didn't realize how big the scale is. I'll close this thread because my suggestion is just not relevant to this forum in such circumstances.