Somethings to say, first of all i think the forum NEEDS to ban the Naims account the most fast as possible because he is going to make new accounts (or maybe he has a few more in the shadows) and its gonna send all the smerits remaining in that accounts to the farm.
Without a doubt the moderators should take a tough stance against him and ban him then look at banning his known alt-accounts too.
I think they are exploiting the generosity of some users, we can see a ton of accounts from the south asian (indonesia/Bangladesh) and Nigeria, who are making this movement of multiplir between them the merits.
There are many good members that from local boards you mentioned therefore it would be difficult to support the theory you have about merit abuse but on the subject of naim027 I think the moderators should have kept the original ban.
First they have some good or primary account, who took merits from serious post, second their have a secondary account or third account and when a pizza or pumpking event appears they op up and collect all the merits in a big ammount from very reputed merits sources.
After that they go to the "ladder" of local board and redistribuied the merits between them.
So like Naim are a few guys behind some accounts.
How you can detect them? Easy, you can see they have a very low activity but a very high merits (they have like 1 activity 1 merit rate). And when you see from where that merits comes its allways the same, pizza BTC or events related, local boards redistribution of merits, beg for merits on the threads when you can put your best posts/threads and received merits to reach X rank.
Obviusly im not putting all in the same box, i know we have some very usefull users here who makes a big effort and really good post, but for example the account of LDL i was following that account for farming a lot of merits, and ended up being one more account of naim......
So in resume their break the rule of not share merits between your own accounts and also exploit the generosity of the communitty to give them merits in the contests.
You are right they have been exploiting the generosity of the community for far too long but as long as the process of banning and then possibly removing the ban on appeal is concerned, it gives hope to account farmers that even their banned accounts stand a small chance of reprieve.
Thank you for not putting all members that are posting particular threads (and in particular boards) in the same box.
