I've been playing with the ILIAS software, and so far, I'm quite impressed. I'll probably keep the site, and use if tor instruction about the domain name system, and topics like that. I don't understand enough about it to know if it could be intergrated into Bitcoin Talk though.

Lets call the responsible members of community boards 'local supporters'. Most local supporters don't seem to want the responsibility of a constant flow of source merits, and they may not need them. However they would like to reward members of their community on an ad hoc basis. Being able to obtain these sMerits would be a benefit to the community, and the forum in my opinion.

Could this be resolved by posting a list of good posts? Not in my opinion. I don't read those lists, as this seems to be moving me towards my membership here becoming a job. Also, it is unlikely that I will understand a foreign language post. There is another consideration as well, I don't want to accept the responsibility of awarding a post selected by another member. I would be happy to delegate that responsibility if I respected the member.

I appreciate that I have some rather traditional English attitudes and beliefs, and I would be happy to accept the community ( and/or Theymos ) decisions in these matters, but I may be too old to change some of my fundamental ideas.

It isn't as simple as that. There are a few members who have received high ranks because of their spamming activities, and one tries to keep sMerits away from them, because they abuse the system. There are also many active members who are beneficial to the forum, but do not have enough sMerits because the are active on minority boards. It would be great if we could benefit from the ideas and discussions that are confined to those communities at the moment. An interesting and helpful member should not be penalised because he is limited to posting in his natural language.

I believe that it should not be possible to award merits to any underworld posts, and that they should not count towards activity. Unfortunately this would lead to an increase in spam on the main boards.

Trust is unmoderated and community based. If you have an issue, then it is personal, and you need to take it up with the person posting the comment.

The problem at the moment is that Bitcoin Talk has a massive influx of economic migrants, and they believe that they can impose their own rules on the forum, and often they don't appear to read any of the guidelines, or show respect to the boards or other members. I would take a much harder line against them, and no doubt this is why I am not a moderator or member of the staff.

You have to step back and consider the operation of the merit system, and its impact on the forum. Most members seem to think of it as an additional ranking tool, but it isn't. Activity is the ranking tool. You join the forum, and you participate in a variety of discussion, and over time you should learn about the operation of the forum, and the variety of communities here. It is assumed that you benefit from this experience, and your rank is increased accordingly. Unfortunately many members are myopic, and don't realise any of the benefits, or they seek to take advantage of the forum for their own financial gain. The merit system was introduced as a barrier to restrict such selfish members to the lower levels, and to allow the community to decide who should be allowed to increase in rank.

Another important function of the merit system is that it gives an insight into the morality of the members. This is especially true now that many excellent analysis tools have been created. These are detecting many abuses such as account farming, the misuse of alt accounts, bounty frauds , and spamming leeches.

I haven't taken much interest in the activities of other merit sources, other than discussing policies with a few of them in my private chat room. From reports that I've read, it seems that Theymos made some pretty good choices in his initial appointments, but that a few of them do not have the time to hunt for meritable posts, and a couple have been abusing the privilege. I think that Theymos has said that he will be reviewing the behaviour of sources, and I'm sure he will resolve those minor problems.

It seems that there is a serious shortage of sMerits available for non-english speaking members, and if we are to combat the creeping evil of globalisation, we need to benefit from the cross-pollenation of ideas from members without the advantage of fluent english. There is no way that I could evalute a Vietnamese post ( for example ), but Vietnmese opinions are important ( as are other countries) when you are considering the preservation of nation states. It would be useful for me if I knew of a trusted member of a local community, and I could provide him with a few sMerits to support his community. There are sufficient observers to ensure that this wasn't abused, especially if all merit transactions were made openly, and were subject to analysis.

Bitcoin is a multi-functional system. It is a payment service, and it isn't too difficult to gain sufficient knowledge to utilise this. It is 'intelligent money' and to take advatage of this, you need to have a deeper and more comprehensive knowledge, especially if you want to become involved in it's evolution. It is a store of wealth, and you don't really need to have any knowledge to take advantage of this. However, I think the greatest challenge is in understand the macro-economic changes that Bitcoin has brought to the world. It has created an alternative to the corrupt fiat sytem that gives sovereign states the chance to break free of the current system of debt slavery.

When I thought of the system, I wondered if dMerits was a good name. It sounds too much like negative merits.  Maybe 'transferable' or 'assigned' would be a better name. There is already confusion between 'source merits' and 'spendable merits' because they are both considered as sMerits. There are a couple of minor points in your post that are inaccurate. I wrote a description of operation of the merits system, and you can read it on my blog ( which I need to give the kiss of life ). The link is -
https://talkmerit.com/the-source/index.php/articles/the-bitcoin-talk-merit-system

My suggestion does not result in a loss of merits, or a risk of condemnation because one is awarding 'friends', as the transfer is not an 'award' but a simple transfer of awardable merits. Take the case of my 10 merit award to seoinc, that was not for one of his posts, but to allow him to merit some Spanish posts, and many would say that it resulted in the waste of 5 merits. The reality is that those 10 merits will be replaced shortly, so it is a gain of 5 merits to the Spanish community. He is a Legendary, so the 10 merits are not going to affect his ranking, but there seems to be an idea amongst some forum members that they are wasted merits. I think that seoinc is under-merited, and that Heroes and Legendaries should be merited to help them to determine community preferences.

I'm anti globalisation by the banking elite, and to combat this, sovereign nations need to work together to preserve their independence and their cultures. The deep state has the benefit of members educated in the English public school system ( remember, these are the exclusive expensive ones, not the state funded ones), followed by an OxBridge conditioning, which includes cross-pollenation with other elite schools around the world. We need to build similar friendships and associations, and a forum like Bitcoin Talk is and ideal place for members to exchange ideas. We need to be able to communicate with each other though, and that is why I created the Fit to Talk translation project. It is also important for us to obtain local news, and the brazilian truckers' strike thread is just one example. Consider the proposed Venezuelan Petro, if this suddenly kicked off, the local board merit source may not be able to handle the volume of quality posts that could appear, allowing a temporary increase would create a useful buffer to handle this.

I think your profile slogan says it all.

Thanks, I missed that. I didn't think I'd get into the lottery until the next activity update, and somehow I felt I'd be one of the last minute jobs.

Re; The meriting of suggested posts. For some reason, I don't feel comfortable with that. It means I'm putting my name on somebody else's choice. I don't mind delegating, because then the award is not my decision.

Would this work?

Selected, or all merit sources have a button to award dMerits, as well as one for sMerits, Awarded dMerits are taken from their sMerit stock. There is a list of authorised receivers of dMerits. This list is made public, and dMerit awards are also published. dMerit activity can be analysed, and the community can report any abuses. The dMerit awarder would need to ensure that he does not make awards to unauthorised recipients.

This would fit into the current merit structure, but Theymos will need to comment on the software changes involved.

We could do a new post for merit on fit to talk

So many people are monitoring merits that any abuse would be seen pretty quickly
Maybe only heroes and legendaries could receive dMerits

I certainly hope so. I don't see him as a cucumber sandwich man, so I hope he arranges his own meeting with Nigel Farage. They seem to get on well together, and I think a meeting would be good for both our countries.

As I mentioned earlier, I've installed an educational package on a domain as an experiment.

This is not intended to be a permanent project, but just an initial experiment. I'll probably take the site down in a few months. I'm in KFC at the moment, and it'a a bit hot here. I'll go to McD tomorrow ( their air con is better), and I'll do a bit of formatting, and you guys can comment. I'll just add a couple of the threads from Fit to Talk as examples.

No, these aren't negative merits, but they are sMerits that can be delegated.

I gave seoinc. 10 merits so that he can award some in the Spanish community, and I messed up by giving a couple of merits to a copy paster. It would have been great if I could have delegated the 10 sMerits to seoinc. for him to pass on all 10, and of course no merits would have been added to his personal total.

How about giving some merit sources the ability to delegate the awarding of a limited number of sMerits. It would make the task of merit sources much simpler, and it would act as a form of apprenticeship for future merit sources.

Whoops!

Maybe I need to delegate my awarding. In fact, that gives me an idea, and I'll post it in Meta.

Thanks for the mention.

One of the difficulties I've noticed in some posts is the subject, verb, object sequencing. It does seem to vary between languages. Another problem is the positioning of adjectives and adverbs. These problems don't seem to be addressed very much, and it is something that slows down reading quite a bit, if a phrase is not structured correctly. It can be a complex topic, but a basic guide could be useful.

Is it worth starting a thread about courses on the beginners board to see what reaction it gets.

Just don't give any to me, or Jet Cash will become Jet Ash.