Generally I try to restrict one merit per post because I only have a limited amount to give and now am involved in lots of interesting projects documenting bitcointalk history - so there are quite a few contributors to reward now for quality contributions. It is quite useful as a bookmark. Previous to this I found it quite difficult to find good posts and see no problem with merit sources rewarding consistent good posters with up to 50 merits.
It’s exactly the same way I do it.
All my Merit I sent out so far was limited to the smallest amount possible to give away. I don’t want to run out of sMerits because if I’ll notice a great post in the future and I have no sMerit anymore it could be an injustice if I compare the quality of the new post I want to reward (but can’t) and the other post I rewarded in the past.
My best solution regarding this problem is to send out the smallest amount of sMerit what’s actually possible and that’s 1 Merit.
A good idea to improve the Merit system could be to change the scale of Merits. Maybe this is a way to solve this problem:
- enable the option to give away ½ Merit or ¼ Merit
- or quite better: change the value of each Merit by multiplicating it by a factor of 5 (or 10) and multiplicate the amount of Merit to rank up also by a factor of 5 (or 10). All Merits already given to accounts (or sMerits stored in the accounts) must also be multiplicated by this factor. If we use a factor of 5 this could be the new rank requirements:
| Rank | Required activity | Required merit |
| Brand new | 0 | 0 |
| Newbie | 1 | 0 |
| Jr Member | 30 | 10 |
| Member | 60 | 50 |
| Full Member | 120 | 500 |
| Sr. Member | 240 | 1250 |
| Hero Member | 480 | 2500 |
| Legendary | 775-1030 | 5000 |
And maybe we can add 10 Merit for the rank of a Jr. Member since it would be much easier to receive a decent amount of Merits.
As a result, there would be more posts awarded because it’s better to have an option to send 5 times 1 Merit as 1 time 1 Merit.
Another positive effect would be that it’s easier for new members to receive their first Merit (what could motivate a lot) and so they could send sMerit and participate in this system, too. In addition, the motivation if you see your amount of Merit growing would have a positive impact on the atmosphere of the whole forum.
Actually, I see lots of posts which are good, but not very good and if we scale the Merit System, these good posts (which are still far away from shitposts) could receive Merits. Dividing low quality spam posts from good (or special) posts was why Merit was introduced.
If we reform the Merit System by offering a better scale, the overall impression and acceptance could be improved a lot.
Normally, changes are quite difficult to implement, I know, but this option seems to be a relative easy one.
With ANN - it is a commercial post. It should be written to a decent standard of the language it purports to be in.
That’s true, the most important purpose to translate ANNs is to receive money and I saw some candidates translating to 8 languages (or more). It’s not difficult to figure out, which translations are done by using Google Translate or similar if you have a look at some points. Like strange words we don’t say in German or if the only German post of a person is a translated ANN. There are some more points we have to check but these red-flags in addition, we can be sure it’s not translated how it should be, what is not fair to native speakers doing it in the right way.
It is different for a user attempting to answer a thread. I'm dyslexic - my language skills are not perfect. Enabling the browser spellcheck has been useful. If I write in some of the other languages I attempt to get better at I would not put an important thread up without getting it checked over by a native speaker. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get someone on the forum to help translate.
The theyoungmillionaire (who I only had a very brief conversation with via PM) helped me translate an important
anti phishing post into Filipino (A lot of Filipino users are victims of exchange phishing scams) and another user helped me translate the same post into Russian (my Russian is quite poor). I like reading the Russian and German forums because it has some high quality posts in there - even though I am not particularly good at either language.
Great
But I’m not very experienced in so many languages like you. I had French a few years ago but now at my university, foreign languages are less important, it’s more technical now. But nice to hear about helpful members, that’s what we need!
