I took a look at this forum's rank on Alexa, it is not good enough; provided that Content is king which is a big tenet in this forum, and why merits were integrated for users who post quality content no doubt articles from this forum rank very fast on google but the number of visitors to this forum has reduced and it affected the ranking of this website.

In 2018 according to Wikipedia, this forum ranked 900 on Alexa Globally.

Later in 2018, it was announced that users without any merit will be demoted to Newbie regardless of their ranks. During this period, so many users left this forum and most accounts were sold out for a couple of dollars. People were desperately in need of bitcointalk accounts with merits so they won't be a Newbie and also for their several businesses in the service thread. (You won't trade with a newbie)

Now in 2020, the forum ranked number 11,525 in February and at 22,845 this month this shows that our forum is doing well in good content but performs very bad in traffic, some threads scare new visitors away, just like this one https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5220580.0

what is the actual aim of making the merit system very hard for users? This will scare some away and those who are not good at writing, it means they don't belong here?

An internet forum where people come to learn and share information on bitcoin is not just a personal forum for some users that have a good rank to suggest how difficult the forum will be. Also, it is clear that most threads from the newbies are not given much attention because of how they structured their article.

If you noticed well, you will see that the signature campaigns are getting closed because companies don't get exactly the kind of traffic they used to see.

The forum is now difficult not only for newbies but for investors who came as newbies and left because they couldn't understand the forum better. I like this section "beginners and guide" but I didn't discover it as a newbie.

I will say that this forum is easy if you have worked hard on it and it's part of you, But very difficult for freshers because of how old members treat them with merit.

What is the reason behind holding a Smerit without giving it out? Most of them will waste or expire. If we put more energy on how we make good articles and also make it easier to harbor visitors that turned to members. This forum will rank as before and we will get enough people that will make use of our signatures for adverts.

I know our moderators are working hard to reduce spam and scam here. But I will encourage users to make here fun, we are in a war forum of smart Alecks that counter every single thread that is published. How do you expect better learning if they are no fun going on here?

looking at the rank of this site do you think Satoshi will be happy? We can build a forum as famous as bitcoin.

link to Alexa rank on bitcointalk.org

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.org
rank for 2018 below
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcointalk#cite_note-alexa-1

Alright here we go again.

What are you talking about? They can freely post just like anyone as long as they're not spamming. The merit system just makes it difficult for people to go here solely for bounty campaigns, and definitely to make it hard for them to account farm.

So a badly made topic didn't gain attention. What's your point? Rank is irrelevant in this case.

Tell you what. A lot of the newbies aren't here to "invest". If they're only here for investing knowledge, they wouldn't even need to take note of their ranks. It's not like their rank is stopping them from investing, right?

So you think spam and account farms are "fun"?

LOL. You think Satoshi would be happy for Bitcointalk being a spam forum?

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Ultimately, Bitcointalk surely did sacrifice some of it's traffic and activity, in exchange for better and more constructive conversations, which is a huge win in my book. Though, we don't even know to what extent of those traffic drop was actually from the merit system. You also need to take note of the actual decrease of interest in Bitcoin since the bull run of 2017.

If you like spam forums, go to the "the-forum-that-should-not-be-named" forum that once had a big signature campaign here.

P.S. I haven't seen a reasonable excuse for removing the merit system, ever since it was implemented. The complaints are really mostly from people who can't rank up themselves so they resort to complaining instead. Tell you what, if you're having a hard time ranking up, maybe do more studying.

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EDIT: oh. no wonder you didn't know about the horrors of not having the merit system.

Not all users were deranked back to Newbie. Only meritless Jr. Members, since all the ranks above had merits (earned or airdropped).

There’s been a global pandemic in between. We should give that a fair share of the reason behind. Alexa does not measure traffic with consolidated certainty, but rather uses extrapolated data from a subset of users. In a pandemic such as this, the models can easily go adrift.
Note the recurrence of the term "estimate" in the above quote (https://blog.alexa.com/improving-your-alexa-rank/).

Not many newcomers will visit Meta, and that thread is really a one-off (i.e. not a recurring idea).

Merits do not expire for anyone. Some Merit Source Merits may go unspent, but you can’t expect them to always spend them all (it’s a pretty selfless task, and time consuming). Sometimes, they need to resort to sprees of a kind to ease their burden …

The forum has so much interesting and competent information, which was not a few years ago. Beginners are open to all sections for their own understanding of any direction. As they say, there would be a desire. For merit, you need competent and useful posts. Yes, maybe for some it is at first difficult. But do not equate the forum to the competition for merit. Why forum information that does not bring any benefit? Or a bunch of plagiarism? Unique content is important. And the forum can be proud of this content.

Correlation doesn't equal causation. The reason the Alexa rank was so high in early 2018 was due to the preceding bull run. Everything was in the green. You could buy any useless scam token and still make a profit from it. The forum was overrun with bounty hunters, spammers, and scammers. There were new altcoins being launched every hour, and new bounty campaigns to go along with them. Thousands of accounts were created just to spam utter trash for the signature rewards. The death of 99.9% of these altcoins are what reduced the traffic to the forum, not the merit system.

Most threads from newbies aren't given much attention because they are either outright spam, have been discussed 100 times before, or they've just copy and pasted from other places (or even worse, tried to hide the fact they are copying and pasting by "summarizing" content they don't understand and introducing multiple errors).

Good. The vast majority of signature campaigns just encourage spammers.

This is completely the wrong attitude, and it's why most threads from newbies don't get any attention, as discussed above. New threads should be opened when you have something interesting the community will want to talk about. Not because you want to earn merit, or write an article, or attract attention to yourself, or gain motivation, etc. Too many newbies open too many useless new threads.

Your problem is that you view the forum's primary function as enabling people to earn via their signatures, and the merit system as a hurdle en route to that goal. You're wrong. The primary function of the forum is to encourage meaningful discussion, and the merit system supports that goal.

? ? ? You're pretty much asking like "how can I get promoted in my job if I don't perform well?". Merits are for quality posts in the first place. That doesn't make sense in the slightest.

A LOT harder. They'd need to have the 150 sMerit to start with, to be able to abuse it.

So you're point is? Again, rank is irrelevant in this case. Good post? It gets some attention. Bad post? It doesn't get much attention. REGARDLESS OF RANK.

But the forum isn't difficult to comprehend though? It might be if ranking up is your main focus, which shouldn't be the main focus in the first place. Bitcointalk is a forum. A place where like-minded people talk about Bitcoin. Not a place to primarily make money.

It's already proven to be a good idea though. LOL. If you think there are better solutions, go ahead. Name them.

I think it's not bad to consider having a better rank with Alexa because it can boost the economy of the marketplace here. It's not worth depending on your entire site but if you can achieve better, why not? But the verdict is that it's not the end of the forum if you don't get a high ranking there. It's also not the measure of success. It's not that important but okay to get a good rank.

Depending on the amount of post is just spam altogether. I would choose quality over quantity anytime.

The best solution to this problem is to increase the number of bot moderators that will be available to check illicit moves on the forum and ban the accounts. Falling behind in ranks, from the age of the forum we may end up being the only users in this forum. Or does it mean you don't want more people to come and learn from the millions of posts in the forum?

I think today is my first time of seeing a site that doesn't care about their Alexa ranking. Hmm, like you said "quality discussion" without enough readers isn't it a waste of information? How about the people that will be searching for this forum and what they will see is other crypto blogs that pop out on search engine. you can't be sure of that. Because you didn't leave this forum from the start doesn't mean you should show less care about the users that left the forum. I'm not worried about the merits, I'm worried about the people that left the community because they got no merit after all the time they spent on the forum.

You can't predict the exact reason why some people leave the forum. Most of them are not here to spam. I know how difficult it is to get to the top in this forum. That is one of the reasons people leave here, and most of them don't surf here enough to know that they is a sub-forum for their respective countries and continent that can welcome them and make them feel at home.

We need proper guide that's all

Well, they can freely create an account right now too and freely contribute or ask questions. People are already doing that regardless of rank. Again, rank doesn't matter.

People can use Tor/VPNs/Proxies, and some people's IP addresses are dynamic.