Great Questions. The agreement seems to be:
1. Article based posts without original thought don't deserve merit.
2. If post history is mostly quoted reports, we should wait at least 2 months from zero-day.
1 – I ignore these posts.
2- --snip--
In these cases I’d rather wait, and if the trend continues and we cross paths again, I may merit the him further down the road. What I don’t want is to reward a momentary change of attitude, and my doubts there can only be dissipated over a larger period of time.
1) I hate these threads.......they would be better off starting a topic in their own words and still link to the article.
....Most of them are likely former bans for plagiarism.....They are not here to contribute they are here to earn and boost their post count.
2)....I did look st their history and they by no means spammed the forum, there were legitimate decent posts in between bounty applications.
I may have held off if the only decent post they had made came after the 1 merit rule, just to make sure it wasn't only to earn a merit and was part of a greater trend towards Improvement.
Question 1:
--snip-- If copy-pasting articles makes up the majority/all of their posts, I report their most recent one and explain they are a serial spammer....
Question 2:
No, I would not merit them. If you ask me again in a month, and that user has shown a sustained effort over a month or longer to improve their post quality and engage in discussion I may. At the moment, there are just too many newbies itching to go back to their spamming ways as soon as they get that elusive one merit.
My thoughts are the same on this. I am maintaining a list of zero-merit newbies to later check back on. Probably others are doing it too. My suggestion to newbies would be to
refrain from campaigns that want you to post nested reports on their ANN page. Go with the ones which allow filling through Google forms. This way you can maintain a better presence of forum and avoid being ignored by most merit-givers.
