NSFN stands for "not safe for newbies". If you're a newbie looking to earn your first merit this topic may elevate your blood pressure.

---

This thread is no longer regularly updated. Shows data as of June 15, 2019.

---

According to merit stats we have sent ~20 thousand merits in 30 days between mid-May and mid-June.

According to ban and nuke stats over the last 9 months on average ~79 thousand merits per month^* are being "destroyed" due to permanent bans (see details below).

Some other data to put this into perspective:

• Coin-1's newbie rank-up thread
• Nikisa's rank-up list

tl;dr: many more high-rank accounts are being banned than new ones being "created".

It's quote obvious where this is going. We will have all merited users banned eventually and only zero-merit users will be roaming the post-apocalyptic ruins of Bitcointalk.

This is the data for ~9 months:


See month-to-month trends below. Each datapoint is taken around the 15th of the month, so for example May 2019 represents data from mid-April to mid-May. Click the charts for a higher resolution image.


Edited 2020-11-29 to fix a broken image

---

^* modlog doesn't have timestamps but I've been scraping it since September 22, 2018 and it seems to go back for another week so I have data since September 15, which is about nine months as of this last edit. This does not account for users that may have been unbanned but I would expect that number to be negligible.

Well, most of it is airdrop too but still - what a waste. I wonder how much of that 600k (edit: wrong) airdrop has already been destroyed this way. 8 months x 50k per month would be 400k, unless the last two weeks was an anomaly of some sort.

Is that a lot of bans recently or just a normal about?

Not only merits destroyed but accounts..

93 Full Member
30 Sr. Member
8 Hero Member
1 Legendary

Are we replenishing ranked accounts at this rate or are upstanding accounts going to become as rare as merits?
+ all the accounts that have been scammer tagged in the same period, I doubt they are keeping up..

People have been talking about adding more ranks above legendary for a long time, this is going to solve that too..
They will be the same old ranks but get increasingly rarer and with a much higher barrier to entry..
Sig campaign pay will go up for those who deserve the privilege..


Is this counting the "airdropped" merits like the 500 I started for being a hero, or just "airdropped" smerits that were sent to these accounts?

I think this data would be most useful if it didn't count the accounts base merits they started with..

Yeah, I would advise anyone to do this if you have the time. I tend to dedicate a certain amount of time now to giving merits when I know I have time to check for plagiarism or not strictly plagiarism, but something that has been repeated to death or has been discussed recently. A common trend among newbies is to back a few pages, and just regurgitate a good reply hoping for some merit.

Just to clarify - despite the sensationalist headline I don't think that's a problem at all. I just would have expected this to have happened a long time ago (i.e. ban-deserving airdropped merits getting banned out) but apparently this is still a thing 8 months in. And after all this whining about how hard it is to earn merits you'd think they would be trying harder to hold on to high-ranked accounts.


The 23300 is airdropped merits (not sMerits) like your 500. The other 1.2k is earned merits since the introduction of the merit system. There is no easy way to find out how many sMerits everyone had at the time of their ban, if that's what you're after.

You're right, and I should have known that because...


So the number of merits would have been ~3-4 million - the ratio of sMerits/merits was 1/5 or less depending on rank and activity IIRC.

Vod probably knows the exact number.

16,224 sMerit is held by autobanned users (including the initial sMerit).

I dont really understand the second part of what you were saying.

theymos did just ad a bunch of merit sources something like 30, with a lower amount of smerit to distribute iirc.

---

Honestly I dont see this as a worrying trend. It mostly points to the fact that a lot of people giant take the merit system (or the forum rules) seriously.

The sad part is that most people who see the value in the merit system already try to distribute them ad intended. The ones who are trading/selling/ farming will just continue to ad to the inferno.

I believe those account are ban they are also merit abuser. Especially newbie and Jr. Members. Because a quality poster shouldn't ban.  Those are baned obviously they are connected with corruption somehow. So it's not bad corrupted and abuser got ban. Never mind few merit are decay, they didn't used their smerit on good post. Here is merit source to recover it. I think smerit limit should increase for merit source.

Ironically half of the bans probably came from being exposed due to them meriting their own alts. We should rename merits as 'alt' or "friend" tokens.

I love how this guy excitedly boasted in Meta about getting merits, then as soon as I brought up the likelihood of him meriting his alts he quickly moved it to Off Topic and locked it  . I think that tells you all you need to know.


I think this is why we should up the requirement to ten before they can have a signature because then giving out one bad merit here and there won't be such an issue. It's such a hassle having to google people's posts just to see if they're plagiarised, and if they're text-spun then you likely won't get a hit either. When one merit is all you need it's like Christmas come early for a spammer and you can get one all too easily and in numerous nefarious ways. Let's see them try to get ten on their dozens of alt accounts. It would make abuse much less likely to happen and also make it much easier to spot. One solitary merit will fly under the radar a lot of the time.