This maybe a noob or complicated question and apologize in advance if this may find you a dumb question to ask but i just want to know the history of how the Merit spread in the forum.
The question doesn't look stupid and what I remember about Merit being first enforced was in 2018 for everyone on this forum.
Secondly, in relation to the title of the topic, I was told that Merit system was introduced by Theymos and my first thought then was, did Theymos hold thousand of Merit when the merit system was implemented and distributed it to the pioneer of this forum? or is he have a merit source key people to do the job? or when the merit system implemented all of the users that time got rewarded some automatically?
When the merit system was implemented in 2018, some people who were already at a certain rank such as Member, Full Member, Senior Member and so on, obviously got a limited amount of merit automatically in their respective accounts.
For example, Senior Member rank automatically has 250 merits in their account and has 20 to 25 smerits in their account at the time, as well as higher ranks such as Hero Members who immediately have 500 merit units in their account. So it is automatically in their respective accounts when merit is applied to this forum.
Because if not then all the rank will back to newbie so it's given for free, don't forget Legendary members gets 1000 merit don't know how much sMerit they got from system.