The forum is not a place in which you should expect to be making income[1]. Making income of this forum is a privilege and not a right, users like you who have not received a single merit since the implementation of the merit system should not blame the system - blame yourself.
It is not the community's fault that you have not received any merit in order to rank up to member so you can add links to your signature and up your bounty rewards with the links you can now add into your signature. Merit was introduced as a way to combat spam and from judging your posts[2] and comparing it to the amount of merit you've earned. Seems like it's worked.
[1] Although I will applaud the legitimate users who've created a part-time/full-time job as a manager. You've done a great job and provided us users with a chance to earn a couple extra bucks a week.
[2] All your last 5-6 pages of posts are just twitter reports for bounties. Do you seriously expect users to merit you for submitting your bounty work? Some people are just privileged.
~Zapo
Thank you.
[1] Look at facts - this forum has become a place for making money. More and more people are joining this society. And you must think about next step. Look at the history - when government of any country do not listen to their people - they lose their power. Be smart.
There was a quote I saw somewhere that would be perfect for this - something about turning into something you don't want to be. I'll try find it later.
The forum was never and the admins will never allow it to be a platform just to host bounties on - we have too many users fighting to eliminate spam and I've seen a lot of bounties now utilizing google forms, and not forcing users to spam their weekly reports.
This is quite similar to an event that happened to Twitch which is one of my favorite sites and is a streaming platform for gamers. In 2016-2017, there was an invasion of cam-girls that where introduced on the platform and infested it, turning it from a site where gamers could go watch other users play and making it chaturbate.Then the eventually added a new TOS that killed those streamers.
The forum is currently in this state, and being infested by bounty hunters and spammer bots and other shady stuff. There are a small bunch of managers trying to combat this spam but it's not shifting. Therefore theymos added merit which has made ranking up for spammers a lot harder and relatively the same difficulty for good posters that in the lower ranks. Slowly we'll see the merit shift over to good posters and a lot of spammers staying at a junior member rank.
~Zapo
