Merit hole and 3 fixes might work (Worth looking)

[mdayonliner]

Bringing Merit on the table was a great idea from the administrator. Anyone has a good sense (admit or ignore) can see the massive improvement on members activity without any doubt. It's obvious now that merit is playing a greater role determine both ranking up and giving credits for your contribution in the forum. The whole idea of introducing merit system is a success in my opinion however I think the application of merit needs to be revised or the members of the forum will keep misusing the system for their own benefits.

Initially, I thought Merit was a bad idea then I realised I was wrong. Few days ago I created a poll to get feedback from the community and the result changed my mind (Although, I believe I need more data to give the credit to the poll but I figured it out anyway).



I looked into deep and I can say, It's not the idea to be blamed it's the application which needs to be improvised.

You may agree or disagree with me but I would love to bring some suggestions on the table. To see better application for the Merit system, consider adding some of these ideas with the current system. I believe we will see better application for the Merit system then.

1. Giving sMerit to someone should have a limit especially when two person is giving sMerits to each others.
-Two individual with bad intention can easily take advantage if they do not have limit giving sMerits to each others.

Consider this example, how two person with having 10 Merits and 5 sMerits each, can really turn their 5 sMerits into 9 more Merits. Eventually they will end up having 19 Merits each from only having 5 initial sMerits each.

Suggestion: Bring a InOneGo limit.

-Allow giving only x amount of sMerits InOneGo to someone  for y amount of periods.

It's really a luxury to send total of 23 merits 21 times to only one person.

Example,
x = 1 sMerit
y = 1 months period.

If person A wants to give another 1 sMerit to the same person B then he has to wait a full 1 months for that.
Of-course the person A can keep giving sMerits to other members like C, D, E etc as long and his limit does not exits.

Note: We know currently person A can give total of 50 sMerits in a month to whoever he wants without InOneGo limit.

I guess experimenting with different values for x and y variable will give you a better answer finding what should be the applicable value for x and y.

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them
-Merit is a form of evaluating a good post. For a Legendary member however in terms of ranking up that merit just became a waste.

When it's coming for Legendary case then merit is losing with its own use-case.

- You give merit to a Legendary you are wasting the limited merit source since it has no use for them on raking up.
- But if you do not merit their good posts then how would their good posts will get recognised?

Suggestion: Don't let the Legendary to receive Merits instead...

Honour the Legendary members by making them a Merit source. Not all of them of-course. Let the community choose who will be their merit source.

Create a criteria of the Legendary members  based on their recent activities. You need data of-course. List the selected group of Legendary members in a poll and let all the other members (except Legendary themselves) give their vote. Then chose top x number of Legendary members and make them Merit source.

Now, this might create another mess if these Legendary members start thinking that they have the power for forever. So, set Y period of time for these Legendary members to be a merit source. After Y period of time there will be another selection process for choosing merit source again. The same Legendary members who were merit source before can also be selected on the new selection process. Power will be distributed equally then.

Keep in mind that recent activities, Y period of time are vary vital for this polling system of choosing merit source from the Legendary members.

Now, question is how would we credit the Legendary members when they provide us great contents? Very simple, bring a special form of crediting feature for them. Such as "upVote" or "like" their post (or something like that which won't have any relation with ranking up)?


3. Accounts ever logged in or even has created from the same IP should not be able to merit each other at all.
-It's really possible that these people know each others personally, may be family members or so. They will obviously try to favour each others with merits.

I'm not 100% sure that the current system restricts creating account from the same IP but I doubt it has this feature. Otherwise we would not see lots of alts. It really is a shame that even higher ranked members are creating alts to take advantage of the system. Whatever is your reason, when you already have an account with the system then creating an alt really is an unethical business.

Anyway, if the system detects that account A and B created from the same IP or account A and B ever come across under the same IP then write a special set of rules for them.
-A and B can not exchange any sMerit ever
-The other accounts (c, d, e etc accounts) who, ever exchanged sMerits anytime with A and B will also be never able to give sMerits to A and B. This will prevent misusing sMerits like this... I (A) will give you (C) two sMerits, please you give 1 sMerits to him (B) situation like this and so on.


Finally, It's obvious that Merit system needs to be revised today or tomorrow. Some may say it's only a month or so, the system need more time to be tested. I do get it and agree with them however... A wise man once said, “All the waters in the oceans won't fill a bucket with a hole in it”

I guess you get the idea now.

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[rlim475]

Firstly, good work on trying to continue the discussion. I agree with some suggestions and others I do not but it's always nice to have healthy discussion and bounce suggestions back off other people.

1. Giving sMerit to someone should have a limit especially when two person is giving sMerits to each others.

I do like this idea in principle but in practice it seems a bit difficult and restrictive. Let's say for example that you really feel like someone's posts require a lot of merit (for example you're a merit source and you review a members old posts and decide to give them many merit because their overall post quality has been good) you would not be able to then do this without first finding someone else to give merit to, in a sense you'd have to be going from A to B to A to B and so on, it would mostly act as a deterrent for some quality posts getting the merit they deserve.

If something like this would ever be implemented I would definitely say that a good change would be to make sure it doesn't apply to merit sources.

However, given the fact that suspicious merit giving is already quite well reported I feel like it's not really a feature that needs to be implemented.

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them

I have thought this for some time, as you rightly mentioned, merit serves no extra purpose for them and is effectively wasted, other than acting as some sort of badge of honour.

I think that within your suggestions you hinted at the essence of the real problem and that's that there are not enough merit sources, if there was more merit then legendaries receiving merit wouldn't be an issue because there would be enough to go around for the lower ranks as well.

The idea of having merit sources that are voted for by the community seems like a good decision, however it's very difficult to allow people to vote on it because people will often feel like they're being hard done by and not receiving enough merit. I also feel that legendary accounts should also be included but exempt from voting for themselves. It should be conducted on a purely positive vote system and whoever gets the most votes wins, of course senior leadership should have the final decision. If such merit sources are added I think they should be some of the largest merit sources, I think there will definitely be a large group of people who are willing to work hard to distribute merit to those who deserve it.

I like the idea of being able to merit legendaries posts in some way without it costing actual sMerit, but then this could skew the rankings of posts based on merit as these legendaries posts could be merited as much as people would like.

3. Accounts ever logged in or even has created from the same IP should not be able to merit each other at all.

If you were going to do this you might as well just stop people from having accounts with the same IP and cut alt accounts by a huge amount. I've read many times that this is not something that Theymos will consider doing.

[mdayonliner]

'Trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair'

- Nice one (do not matter where did you get it). Anyway that's off topic. I sent you an sMerit (only one I had) for good constructive feedback. Keep it up.

it's always nice to have healthy discussion and bounce suggestions back off other people.

-Sure it is.

 

...you would not be able to then do this without first finding someone else to give merit to...

- You won't need to find someone else to give merit for that post. Someone else will surely find it to give merit since it's a good post. I believe there are enough people who are merit source (or will be) to merit for good work. In my opinion restriction will improve misusing sMerits giving someone again and again and again. You can give sMerit to the same person after certain period of time though. All you need to do is to wait.

Consider when you were a new member. I guess when you are a new member, just joined, the system did not allow you to make two posts in an hour. This was for spammers who has intention to spam, is kind of just to stop them from what they wanted to do. Sure you can not stop everyone, still we see people are spamming but at-least it's a good way to stop them for a while at the first place.

It's my own view of-course I do not disagree with your views as well.


PS: It's a shame that most of the people in the forum are keep saying new members are lacking knowledge hence they can not post quality contents. Guess what it's not always true. I seen there are new members who are doing better then some of the highest ranked members. I went through your posts and you deserve more merits on some of your contents.

[mdayonliner]

Initially, I thought Merit was a bad idea then I realised I was wrong. Few days ago I created a poll to get feedback from the community and the result changed my mind (Although, I believe I need more data to give the credit to the poll but I figured it out anyway).

More data has been added on the poll since we made this OP. Sill I can see most of the people are happy because of the merit however they are not happy due to the way people are abusing their sMerit.

[Emilyearl]

The intentions of the merit system is good. But when you look at its result so far, especially in the meta board, you will see a lot of persons spamming the forum with various merit talks which has been addressed over and over again. On the other hand, shit posting hasn't been put to a stop as bounty hunters still try to meet up with their weekly post targets. So to me, it's good of it gets pulled off well

[surfinonmyownwavebaby]

Well said, I especially agree with point #3 because it does seem like a waste. Not that they don't deserve it because they obviously do and have more knowledge but it does seem wasteful in a sense. Point #1 and #3 seem like they would be easy to track and the abuse would get caught quick I believe.

[Bardman]

''Honour the Legendary members by making them a Merit source'' There is already an application form for that, I personally think that giving merits to legendary users is fine as long as you are giving merits to newbies+ as well. Usually if someone is abusing the merit system he/she gets caught quite often because it's quite obvious when someone is giving a ton of merit to himself if he doesn't deserve it and hey, if he does deserve it then it shouldn't even be a problem, right?

[gordeevaar]

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them
-Merit is a form of evaluating a good post. For a Legendary member however in terms of ranking up that merit just became a waste.

A lot of members here have suggested the same in different threads here about the merit system. Here is why the admin might have ruled this possibility:

1) He might have planned a future change to the system requiring certain number of merits for all ranks to maintain the current rank.

2) Since a members also gets some Smerits on receiving merits, it gives legendary member a chance to merit other members.

3. Accounts ever logged in or even has created from the same IP should not be able to merit each other at all.
-It's really possible that these people know each others personally, may be family members or so. They will obviously try to favour each others with merits.

I am not sure that this will work. There are so many ways to exploit this, I mean there are hundreds of free proxy. One can even buy dedicated IPs for multiple profiles. depending how much he is earning from his profile here.

[fedorover]

1. Giving sMerit to someone should have a limit especially when two person is giving sMerits to each others.
-Two individual with bad intention can easily take advantage if they do not have limit giving sMerits to each others.

I am not in favor of putting this restriction:

1) Those who are abusing this, i.e sending merits to their alt accounts repetitively for shit posts are already getting caught. This is in fact working as an easy method to catch spammers. Admin may want to ban all this members permanently later.

2) There may be some genuine users making really good posts. All their posts might be deserving enough to get merits from same member again and again. If the rule you suggested is implemented, such members will also suffer and may get discouraged.

[Oulay]

Nice poll!

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them

I believe Theymos has ruled out preventing Legendary members from receiving merits. So my suggestion is to make legendaries receive 1 sMerit for every merit. It may allow some abuse of the system but it would put their accounts on the line and I don't think that would be a wise move of a Legendary member.
Anyway it's not actually a "hole" in the system. Lets say 10% of merits are gone to Legendary members every month. Increase merit generation by sources by 10%, problem solved! So it doesn't actually need a specific solution.

[krishnaverma]

Nice poll!

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them

I believe Theymos has ruled out preventing Legendary members from receiving merits. So my suggestion is to make legendaries receive 1 sMerit for every merit. It may allow some abuse of the system but it would put their accounts on the line and I don't think that would be a wise move of a Legendary member.
Anyway it's not actually a "hole" in the system. Lets say 10% of merits are gone to Legendary members every month. Increase merit generation by sources by 10%, problem solved! So it doesn't actually need a specific solution.

This special privilege is not required at all. Suppose there is a member here with two legendary accounts. He can generate as many merit points he wants  if the suggestion you said was implemented. Most of the senior members are responsible enough but we may have sale of accounts happening frequently. Sometimes the accounts also get hacked and if a scammer has access to such accounts, he will abuse this privilege.

[Oulay]

Nice poll!

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them

I believe Theymos has ruled out preventing Legendary members from receiving merits. So my suggestion is to make legendaries receive 1 sMerit for every merit. It may allow some abuse of the system but it would put their accounts on the line and I don't think that would be a wise move of a Legendary member.
Anyway it's not actually a "hole" in the system. Lets say 10% of merits are gone to Legendary members every month. Increase merit generation by sources by 10%, problem solved! So it doesn't actually need a specific solution.

This special privilege is not required at all. Suppose there is a member here with two legendary accounts. He can generate as many merit points he wants  if the suggestion you said was implemented. Most of the senior members are responsible enough but we may have sale of accounts happening frequently. Sometimes the accounts also get hacked and if a scammer has access to such accounts, he will abuse this privilege.

I took that into consideration. I said that "It may allow some abuse of the system", but abusing the merit system using a Legendary account is not worth it, because you may get that account banned as a result. And the cost of those legendary accounts will be much higher after a couple of months into the merit system.
And I also said "It doesn't actually need a specific solution."

[mobilazy]

I don't think it is waste for Legendary. They receive 0.5 sMerits per 1 received merit. Then they could distribute it to other members, someones even help junior (in general term) members to rank up. I see this type of initiative mostly among Legendary members. That is a very good think. And some of them are really knowledgeable and no wonder they get more merits.

[mdayonliner]

I don't think it is waste for Legendary. They receive 0.5 sMerits per 1 received merit. Then they could distribute it to other members, someones even help junior (in general term) members to rank up. I see this type of initiative mostly among Legendary members. That is a very good think. And some of them are really knowledgeable and no wonder they get more merits.

2) Since a members also gets some Smerits on receiving merits, it gives legendary member a chance to merit other members.

The point is, if you give special privilege to the Legendaries such as making them merit source then you don't even need to waste one merit to have them 0.5 sMerits 

...especially in the meta board, you will see a lot of persons spamming the forum with various merit talks which has been addressed over and over again.

- In time these people will get tired and only the people who cares about the community will last till the end.

I am not sure that this will work. There are so many ways to exploit this, I mean there are hundreds of free proxy. One can even buy dedicated IPs for multiple profiles. depending how much he is earning from his profile here.

- yes there are however things will be really difficult for someone then, and which will eventually reduce the numbers of the abusive accounts.

2) There may be some genuine users making really good posts. All their posts might be deserving enough to get merits from same member again and again. If the rule you suggested is implemented, such members will also suffer and may get discouraged.

How would you justify a post whether it worth 1 merit or 50 merits? In my view since you do not have any standardisation so just come out with a default setting such as in a drop-down box set it like 1, 2, 3, 4 or the highest 5. The use will try to judge the post worth what number out of 5. If it's 2 then select 2!

It really hurt to see getting 10 merits or even 50 merits for a post where in a month a user can send the total of 50 sMerits.

My pleasure

Yes, right for sure.

[gopaljiverma]

I don't think it is waste for Legendary. They receive 0.5 sMerits per 1 received merit. Then they could distribute it to other members, someones even help junior (in general term) members to rank up. I see this type of initiative mostly among Legendary members. That is a very good think. And some of them are really knowledgeable and no wonder they get more merits.

Regarding those 0.5 merits being useful for junior members, they will still remain useful if they come from a  lower rank member. It makes more sense to allow merits for low rank members only as they need it. However, this idea of stopping merit points for legendary members will result in one problems. Some of the campaign managers have started the criteria of having some amount of earned merits for higher payout. No if merit points are discontinued for legendary, they will suffer because of this or the campaign managers will have to change the rules for this rank again.

[Tyrantt]

Since I'm using the forum on my phone right now, it's quite a feat. So, I'll just go over the 3 issues OP provided.

1. Giving sMerit to someone should have a limit especially when two person is giving sMerits to each others.

Well it's limited to 50 smerit per month, yea? I don't quite understand this one but there is a limit.

2. For a Legendary member, receiving Merit should have a restriction or (may be just) don't apply Merit for them

You think that legendary members should not be able to recieve merit or..? If thats the case, that's wrong. Merit is there to show the users posting quality, and that even goes for legendary membera since you didn't have to have any quality in posts to reach that rank before merit was implemented.

3. Accounts ever logged in or even has created from the same IP should not be able to merit each other at all.

I believe that ones with the multiple accounts could use browser like tor sp they won't have the same ip. Also, jn some countries you have to pay for static ip, therefore people can just restart their routers and get new ip.

[lukyanli]

Since I'm using the forum on my phone right now, it's quite a feat. So, I'll just go over the 3 issues OP provided.

Well it's limited to 50 smerit per month, yea? I don't quite understand this one but there is a limit.

You think that legendary members should not be able to recieve merit or..? If thats the case, that's wrong. Merit is there to show the users posting quality, and that even goes for legendary membera since you didn't have to have any quality in posts to reach that rank before merit was implemented.

I believe that ones with the multiple accounts could use browser like tor sp they won't have the same ip. Also, jn some countries you have to pay for static ip, therefore people can just restart their routers and get new ip.

1) That limit is 50 merits per post. There is no limit on how many merits you can spend in a day or month.

2) This is debatable and different members will have different opinions here. I think OP wanted to say here is that new members are finding it very hard to get merits because of increased competition. Those new members will always face trouble competing with legendary members (who are much experienced).

3) This IP issue can be easily manipulated in a number of ways including the one you mentioned.

[Tyrantt]

Since I'm using the forum on my phone right now, it's quite a feat. So, I'll just go over the 3 issues OP provided.

Well it's limited to 50 smerit per month, yea? I don't quite understand this one but there is a limit.

You think that legendary members should not be able to recieve merit or..? If thats the case, that's wrong. Merit is there to show the users posting quality, and that even goes for legendary membera since you didn't have to have any quality in posts to reach that rank before merit was implemented.

I believe that ones with the multiple accounts could use browser like tor sp they won't have the same ip. Also, jn some countries you have to pay for static ip, therefore people can just restart their routers and get new ip.

1) That limit is 50 merits per post. There is no limit on how many merits you can spend in a day or month.

2) This is debatable and different members will have different opinions here. I think OP wanted to say here is that new members are finding it very hard to get merits because of increased competition. Those new members will always face trouble competing with legendary members (who are much experienced).

3) This IP issue can be easily manipulated in a number of ways including the one you mentioned.

2) well that's not just because of competition, besides that just compare one legendary with on lower rank, it's easy to see the big difference. I mean, just look at my shitposting before and now, I'd say theres a drastic improvement. Also, they're expecting to get merit for every non-shitpost they write.

[Alone055]

Since this complete discussion is based on the point that not all quality posts are merited then I would just answer that, keeping aside at first the other issues you have mentioned along with that.
Undoubtedly, we all know that the population of this forum is way more than a few countries in the world. Keeping that in mind, we can have a rough estimate of how many replies a thread can receive in a time span of 1 hour or so. Now, among these replies, there are quality posts as well, but maybe the readers are not carrying Merits with them, or maybe the one's having Merits to give are missing those posts in the crowd or replies. Now that I don't think is because we have less Merit Sources, or people are ignoring them, but it is because of the increasing population of this forum. People with available sMerits in their accounts only Merit the posts they come across while surfing the forum. I don't think anyone would sit in front of his PC with the only task of finding constructive posts to Merit them.
So basically, I don't think there is anything wrong with the system or we have less Merit Sources, but these things will keep happening, even if we have way more Merit Sources. As long as we are too many (I mean the users), we will see such things in future too. The system is not to be blamed for something like this IMO.