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To get the merit, you need to post really good articles, as far as I know, there are some people who do such as theyoungmillionaire, he farmed more than 500 merit in a few months by reporting spam, contributing for community.
theyoungmillionaire is one of the best posters as you say, with 531 earned merits to date. Reporting spam is not really a merited task in general (there are exceptions). People really do it out of their concern for the forum, hoping for a cleaner more fluid view of decent posts, but seldom in hope of getting merits.
Just a comment on the term "farmed" you used: one of the things that is part of the problem on the forum is "account farming" (i.e. trying to run multiple accounts for bounties and generating spam posts as a result, lowering the quality of posts in search for quantity + possibly breaking forum rules in the process that lead to account banning). That differs enormously from what
theyoungmillionaire is doing (246 posts -> 531 merits; one of the best ratios on the forum), so the term could lead to some confusion (I guess you meant something in the line of “was awarded”).
English is important, you have to understand what the topic is talking about and you have knowledge of the subject to comment, do not think that any comment will be merit.
That is so. You need to master the language and be rather well versed in terms of expression and give a certain depth in general to your posts. There are also local boards, some of which do have Merit Sources assigned to them to boost merit awarding, and are therefore possible alternatives to the English language barrier.
There is another way I find it easy to make merit, that is to Meta box and report the spam, plagiarism or report the bounty scam ...
Again, not so really. Spam and plagiarism reports area not merited often nowadays, but should be encouraged to keep a cleaner forum and, as a side-effect, give more visibility to good posts (the tree and the forest thing…). Scams should be reported in
Scam Accusation or
Reputation (depending on what you are reporting). If others find it useful and solid, they may award merit to the person who brought the case to the attention on those threads. For example, take a look at this thread:
1 MAN 560+ accounts on forum, Millions of tokens abused. Building a case like this is not easy and rather time consuming. Nevertheless, it is a great service to remove cheaters from the forum.
Meta is more about forum structure and governance/rules really.