The recent addition of the merit system along with the abuse of the new additions to DT2 will make it much harder for those tagged for invalid reasons to gain merit.
I’m not sure about you but id think twice about awarding merit to someone with negative trust.
The merit system seems good for new members and removing the low level posts and single sentence posts, but from the looks of it lots of older members who have contributed to these forums are being left behind and forgotten about while they try to address the problem of spam.
I think you’re missing the point, though. Just because you’re an old member of the forums doesn’t mean that you’re automatically entitled to merit. You can have a 5 year old account here and still be a shitposter.
I will agree, however, that there has been much less spam on the forums his past week since merit was introduced. As an avid user of the watchlist feature to watch entire boards of topics I’m genuinely interested in, I’ve noticed that the daily page counts are not nearly as high as they were in previous months.