You can't tell people how to use their earned smerits or source merits
Sure you can:
I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.
And for Merit sources:
It's conceivable that someday you and I will end up disagreeing too much about this stuff and I'll remove your source status, but it's really not a big deal.
I like the last part: it's not a big deal.
My first thought is that completely disabling merit distribution in the WO thread is too heavy-handed. I think basing it on rank (e.g. you can't receive merit in the WO thread unless you're at least a Hero Member, or something) makes a nice compromise between dropping a spanner in the works of account farmers but still letting WO regulars have their fun.
Or, as a BOFH solution: don't count the Merit received in certain threads, just like posts in Off-topic aren't included in your total post count.
My second thought is that this could actually be implemented as an SMF feature, in the same vein as self-moderated threads. Something like this:
As much as I would like more features like this, it would be very bad. It gives users power over other users. There have been requests before to make it impossible for certain Ranks to post in your thread, but that too was never implemented. Disabling Merit for the users who need it the most to earn their place in this forum would strongly discourage real users. May I remind you:
proxybans have collateral damage too. Denying Newbies from earning Merit even when their posts are good is not fair.
Merit requirements per rank are already very high. In 5.5 years,
300+ users have earned enough Merit to be self-made Legendary. A couple (hundred) Merits more or less doesn't matter much.
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