This proposal is not completely mine; it was inspired by a post of another user in the German forum. I am also not sure if it wasn't proposed here already.
I propose to allow to send less than a full sMerit point, for example half a merit, or 0.1 or 0.3 merit points.
The reason: Lower-ranked users have often very few sMerits to give away. But many of them want to participate and say "thank you" to other users even if they wouldn't send them one of their scarce full sMerit points they own. In fact, this is one of the more frequent complaints I read about the Merit system.
So if they could send less than a full merit, lower-ranked forum members could rate other users more often. This could increase the acceptance of the merit system (which I consider a very positive initiative) among this large user group, and make it less "elitist".
Alternative / simpler proposal: In addition to the "full Merit points", create a lower category of merit points - for example "silver merits" that are valid 0.1 full merit points, and full merit points would then become gold merits. That would essentially have the same effect - lower-ranked users would be allowed to participate more frequently in the merit system.
Technically, this shouldn't be a problem. The only possible disadvantage I see is that merits could, in certain circumstances, circulate slower if high-ranked members chose to give away silver merits or fractional merits instead of full merits. That could be prevented if, for example, the sending of fractional/silver merits is restricted to users that have less than e.g. 50 available sMerits.
It is better the current way, allowing merit points in decimal points will cause a lot of confusion. Regarding new users with one merit point, not being able to give merits to other users, this is not a big issues. How hard is it to get two merit points ? Admin could have implemented the system like sending one Smerit to each registered member but this is again something that merit farmers will abuse. They will create multiple accounts to get that one default merit point and spread it to main alt accounts.
