Hey all,

as most of us now had some time to get acquainted with the new Merit-System, I thought it would be a good time to try and utilizes this great new forum feature.
To be more specific: Utilize it in Signature Campaigns.

But why in Signature Campaigns?
My reasoning here is the following: Merits mainly were introduced to reduce spam.
Signature Campaigns are responsible for a lot of spam, even if many of them try to encourage their participants to produce 'quality posts'.
Obviously, the majority of those posts aren't, else most of them would get merited. The threshold for a post to qualify as a 'quality post' in most Signature Campaigns
is extremely low hence there is no incentive to make really good posts.

The main problem here is, that if a member has a certain level and is 'stuck' there due to the Activity-rule, there is almost no reason for this member to create valuable posts as he can't get more stakes.

This is neither good for the forum, nor for the campaign itself as advertisement done by members who really post quality is also more valuable than by those who just 'get by'.
I already saw some hesitant suggestions to make Signature Campaigns solely based on Merit. While at a first glance this sounds feasible, I think that kind of change wouldn't work mainly
due to the fact that the higher the Rank, the better the ad space, so to speak (better signature).

That's why I attempted to find an easy system that allows for Rank and Merit to be regarded in Signature Campaigns when it comes to the calculation of stakes.
And because I like visually pleasing things, I made it a bit more colorful  

                            
                            Alternate layout



This might look more complicated than it is. As most Bounty Managers already use Spreadsheets, it's really easy to use prepared formulas like the following (first example).
It needs to have some more levels/nested conditions though, but I didn't want to make the example too complicated:

      

       =IF(C2>B3;D3+(C2-B3)/(B4-B3)*((D4-D3)/4);D2+(C2-B2)/(B3-B2)*(D3-D2)/2)



This is just an approach and an attempt to get the Merit-System transfered to Signature Campaigns because I think that this would really benefit the forum as it creates the needed incentive to even
make good posts if you can't rank up due to missing Activity. With the Merit now factored in, members get more stakes even if they stay the same Rank but they never get that much more Stakes then a member with a higher Rank
(IF that member also stays active and creates value).

A more sophisticated way could be to count the earned Merit (last 120 days) based on the forum stats. There are also many other variations (Merit/Rank/Activity), but that's something for another thread.

This took more time than I thought and now it's getting late here. I hope that I didn't make any grave mistakes
I'm really curious what you think, would you take a different approach to introduce Merit in Signature Campaigns? Hopefully, there will be some Bounty Campaigns that will include Merit in their Stake-distribution.
Cheers!

Then that member is here for all the wrong reasons and should be encouraged to find somewhere else to spam.  This problem, the one of members joining bitcointalk to support huge families of dirty, ungrateful offspring that they can't seem to stop having, is endemic.  I think campaign managers ought to be a hell of a lot more selective than they have been.  I thought SMAS was going to clean up a lot of the bullshit, but you still see shitposters even in campaigns run by very respectable managers, like Yahoo62278, Lutpin, and some others.  I know they've got to get participants, but standards have really deteriorated since the inception of SMAS.  And then you have shitty managers in the altcoin bounties who will accept any garbloon who can make character quotas.  Posts don't even have to be coherent, don't have to make any sense--they just need to be abundant. 

Don't know how the merit system is going to influence this, but I've seen rates being adjusted based on merit points earned.  That's a step in the right direction.

I don't think so. Sadly, this lower ranks has their own way of gaining some merits that can make them rank to member. Yes, it is not that a problem there are a lot more lower ranks that will flourish make their way to member and spam the forum until they are a legion of accounts with the same ranks that is ready to be ranked up and just joining bounty campaigns that will earn themselves some currencies.

Unless every bounty campaigns require KYC to reduce this accounts.

KYC is not going to be implemented by the admin as he mentioned this in one of the posts. I am also not a big fan of KYC as these things are easily abused. Any smart internet user has knowledge about places where he can get fake documents for KYC. These people are able to bypass the KYC requirement for leading websites like PayPal using these documents and thus they will easily fake it here as well.

Well however, some form of ID would be nice, I mean also if they're buying merit and let's say it's somewhat $7 per merit (someone pointed that out) that would mean a lot of money to be given out so even if they had like 5 accounts, that's $35 for 1 merit on one account.

But considering the bounty campaigns, campaign managers can think of some way to prevent multiple accounts.

As long as there are no other mechanisms here, that prevent this, this argument is moot. To say that 'things should be different' doesn't solve problems. That's why I'm trying to find an easy way to make things better, one step at a time


I also don't think that all those lower levels will necessarily give up, but that's not my point here, I'm not only talking about new accounts or accounts with lower rank. There are many many higher ranking accounts Full Member, Sr. Member and also Hero Member accounts that are content with just getting by in Signature Campaigns as they already get a lot of stakes due to their rank. Again, right now, there is small to no incentive to make good posts that deserve merit. But KYC is a bit too much, isn't it?

A Sr. Member, for example, has 250 Merit. To qualify for Hero Member, he needs 250 more Merit. Getting 250 isn't an easy feat. Even if he'd start posting valuable content, he has no imminent benefit from it, so he might as well stay Sr. Member as they're getting a lot of stakes in Bounty Campaigns as it is. He could come to the conclusion that he wouldn't reach the 250 Merit anyway. So why would he then create valuable posts in the first place when just posting some 75+ characters long blahblah will suffice? My approach would immediately reward him for getting Merit and by this encourage him to create valuable posts.

The same applies to the Full Member and Member Rank, as 90 and resp. 150 Merit are also very hard to come by (and I know what I'm talking about as my post obviously has no value/doesn't deserve Merit no farming intended, I just want to prove a point, a sad one).
Thought the effort would count for something, but obviously it didn't.



Awesome! I didn't know that. I hope that this will be more common in the future.
But this implementation needs to factor in both, Rank and Merit, at least I think that this would be the best way because a higher Rank allows for more and better ad space.


Well, this would shift the Bounty Campaigns to external sites in order to obfuscate whether a Sig is a paid campaign Sig or not. On top of that, someone has to keep track of all those campaigns and payments, that's a fulltime job  

I really do hope someone run a signature campaign and the sole payment is a merit or two.
I'd like to established my account on a higher ground before leaving this earth.

That's being said the thread seems to be perfect, We all agree to the same conclusion merit is highly needed in this community have we not?

how about getting more when they increase their merit during the campaign, they will try more constructive, helpful post during the campaign.

like before campaign 60 merits after the campaign 80 then 20 more stakes will be added

Well, the main reason for me was that the forum lacks some features to better style things, so I chose a graphical way, especially since colors makes it easier understandable (at least for me). I also posted an alternate link below the image.
And I chose this layout because I already had a preset for it. So if you prefer something without bells and whistles, here you go:

      

But to be honest, don't you find it a bit rude to react in that way? I put time and effort into it in order to make it easy to read since it's not that easy at the first glace. If you can't be bothered to read it, don't read it.



That is exactly what the simple formula does  
It takes also into account which rank you've got so that the additional Merit gets properly weighted

You suggested that 1 Merit = 1 Stake. Did you test? Make an example and see if this method would be 'fair' for everybody. At a first glance, it doesn't look that way but I didn't test it

Here is one of my tables if you like.

This is a great Idea in principle, but I think your numbers are a little off to start. Achieving the number of merits needed is a mighty task (I speak as someone who has a much greater number than needed so this isn't personal) working a number that starts at 5% above the base rate and then increases every month by a % or two would in my eyes work.

Managers all need to embrace a minimum standard level, and it may even be an Idea to get the managers to join a club? Where only the managers that employ a minimum standard can join - that would enable the advertisers to know that they are only employing the best standard of managers and therefore the best applicants