I have this habit of reading through many replies to a thread before I will respond. At the course of reading through few pages of a thread before replying, I discovered that;
- The earliest replies get more attention and earn more merit
- Some of the replies from pages 3 upwards are repetition of what others said in pages 1 and 2.
- I also understood that some of the quality contributors sometimes arrive late and their replies get buried easily
I therefore propose that, if possible, the arrangement of replies to a thread should be based on the number of merits that reply earned in that very thread. This will tend to sort the quality replies to appear in the first page no matter what time it was made. Even if the reply appeared on page 7, just 1 merit to that reply will send it to page 1. This will also help researchers to meet the most relevant posts in the first page, without having to search through tones o replies.
This sounds good to me but it may not go well with some other persons, I decided to drop the suggestion here. Although, I don't know much about the SMF version of the forum, but with the way people complain about it, it seems it doesn't allow some certain things to be incorporated to the forum.
It's not obvious always that the earliest replies will get merit, it depends upon the reply that is the reply according to the post or it is just spam. Mostly those replies get merit which is according to the post or someone helps each other in a way the help is needed.
Some people look at others' replies to what they said in the bitcoinTalk to that post, so sometimes there are some talks in their minds, which suddenly come to a person's mind and thus he replies to the post.
And if someone likes a person's reply and gives it merit while it is not according to the post, and another person doesn't like the reply, How could that message be kept on the front page?
Also, you will see the merit posts on the first pages and you will find other users' posts and search for them going to other pages, I don't think it's a good idea.