Bitcoin Forum

I am tired of so many complaints about Merit/sMerit. It is most certainly a step in the right direction towards improving the quality of discourse on this forum. That being said, a very small minority of complaints about Merit/sMerit may be of value.

One of the things people complain a lot about is that there are not enough Merits to go around, especially in some local/niche threads. The number of Merit sources have been increased, and this should partially help the situation. However, there needs to be a way to shut the complainers up once and for all. Therefore, I propose the following - Recommend for Merit.

What is Recommend for Merit?
Recommend for Merit would be a button available on each post. You can recommend your own post or any other high quality post that you think hasn't received any Merit but deserves it.

What Does it Do?
There would be a way for all the Merit Sources to see, in a single view, all the posts that have been 'Recommended for Merit'. If they think a post deserves Merit, they can give merit to that thread and that removes the post from the list of awaiting posts. Perhaps they also have the ability to remove low quality posts from this list (or only Mods).

What About Abuse?
This would be the biggest problem. So perhaps you can limit the number of posts that can be recommended for Merit based on the user rank or some other criterion.

What About Rewards?
Similar to reporting spam, if a user repeatedly identifies undervalued posts for Merit and the posts are subsequently Merited, they can optionally be rewarded by the Mods/Merit Sources.

What About Punishments?
There may be a staked game where users stake their own Merit to recommend their posts. But perhaps the most effective way would be that if some users abuse this system, they get awarded negative merit.

Idea in Progress. Feedback Welcome

I like the idea, this way people will be able to help a post gain merit, even if they don't have any sMerit themselves. Perhaps multiple people could recommend a post for meriting, and a counter would be increased on the side to represent the number of recommendations a post has. I also think that posts in the meta section should not be meritable, as probably over 75% of all merits have been given in the meta section, a section that was previously dead before the introduction of merit. I really don't think people should be merited for talking about merit.

Agreed. Here are some points from your reply -

• Multiple votes for a given post is definitely a good idea. Just need to prevent abuse. Maybe some sort of a tiered system or weighted voting based on rank?
• Posts in the meta section can be excluded. I mean, that's an implementation detail. I think good posts should be merited even if they talk about Merit.
  The goal is to make the forum better, I see no reason why. But the important point is, it is doesn't matter. If Theymos decides to exclude this section, that's totally fine by me. Doesn't change anything really.

so , do i need more merit to rank up to Sr.membre ?

Yes you need to achieve Merit requirement to move to the next rank


Merit:

In addition to Activity you now need Merit to achieve each rank. The required merit is detailed below:

Brand New	0
Newbie	0
Jr Member	0
Member	10
Full Member	100
Sr Member	250
Hero Member	500
Legendary	1000

Within the current system, a similar approach would be to show a list of the posts you would like to recommend for merit in the personal text area, see the left of this post, which I proposed here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3057603).  It helps merit sources to review quality posts and automatically resolves the issue in the OP as there is a limitation of the number of posts you could list, though currently there is no way to list recommendations of all users in a single view.

The problem is, you can only do that for your own threads in your proposal. That generally doesn't solve much. If you're a newbie, no one is going through your list of posts or your recommendations anyway. A universal view is the only legitimate way to go about it, and the recommendations need to be made by others, not you.

If you're short on sMerit but find a good post, you can just recommend it. The workflow is much smoother.

TL;DR: A pointless, overcomplicated system that will be overly abused and not put to good use (my opinion, anyway)

Mods are swamped enough - they don't need additional work. I'm guessing not many merit sources would use it either, as it would be abused by people who recommend their own posts, or use an alt to do it, and with the size of the forum, it would be flooded. I am a merit source, and I know for sure that I wouldn't use it, so I assume that most others would not as well. (though it might be because I'm a small source and seem to use merit faster than I regain at the moment. Many other merit sources don't seem to be using up all their merits)

I'm a source, currently I have no idea to post a new task for people to earn merits as the reward for completing them. I see and read many posts, if I'd merit a post close to my opinion, I would be a biased merit source. I actually would like to voluntarily spend time and have people PMing me to merit them. or have a place to go and check some of the highlighted posts. whatever it could be. just nothing extra work for theymos and other staff. I wouldn't mind helping.


Whenever I send merits, next day I would get more. theymos doesn't want us to have all the merits at once, or it could be a bug.

Here is how a spammer with multiple accounts abuse this:

1) He will make some good posts with his main account that he want to rank up. Then he will use this option to recommend his posts for merit with own account.

2) Once the limit for that account is over for recommending for merits, he will use the alt accounts and complete the limit one by one.

Giving these privileges to all accounts is the main cause of abuse.

The idea is to have an easier time filtering content, and also be able to access content from multiple threads. For example, perhaps you don't frequent the economics section much, but if someone pointed out a few threads for you to check out for quality/merit, you would do that since it is easier than wading through a million posts.

theymos had to think about it a long time ago .. to have implemented this system only now .. in my opinion it only generates confusion and discontent

There's nothing like perfect implementation. There was a problem, he offered a solution. It may not be perfect but it sort of works fine. As a community, we can make it better, hence the proposal.

This can cause spam on creating many accounts to recommend their own shits.

Too much work form them if they can handle this situation I think from the start they will not introduce sMerit system if they can handle to give merits to all high quality contents.

Really? on your full member rank you are still ignorant about this? you dont deserve that rank.

I've addressed the spam issue already if you read the whole post. I don't think it's a problem, plus there are always subjective punishments for spamming. Besides, if your posts don't get Merit anyway, doesn't matter how much you try to spam in the recommendation, they still won't get any.

Clicking on a button to recommend for merit is not too much work.

Recommend for Merit option is not a bad idea, but I think the main problem with this system is that people aren't willing to give Merit points, because they don't wont to use it all. If there was some option to gain more sMerit points (not Merit) then maybe users would give it the way they give likes on facebook/twitter - for useful links, content, funny posts, whatever they want (not only for the best quality posts). In current situation, regular posters leading normal discussion have very little chance to earn any Merit, ever.