[edited out]
Sorry JJG, but I have no time right now to read your long text. Probably later. Just saw you posing many questions.
So here again in short what I wanted to say:
1) If you were to want to get more active users to the Forum you are probably doing the right job with regard to your merits spending!!
I am merely participating in the forum, and having more interest in bitcoin rather than other topics. I don't have any mission to attract members to the forum, even if there might be some side effects that my participation in the forum or even my smerit sending might inspire some members to participate in the forum more than they would have had otherwise...
However: I personally think there are better ways than to attract farmers who are not here for Bitcoin talk.
But that's Theymos' problem and a question about the merit system in general, nothing you can solve. So I think you are successfully doing what you can to increase active users ... if that'd be your objective.
I am just participating in the forum, and yeah, I was assigned as a merit source so I spend the merits that I have (or at least I try to).. which ends up being nearly every day. Surely it may well be easier to spend smerits in large chunks (as the way some members do it) rather than the way that I do it
**... , and surely there are merit source forum members who have dilemmas regarding how to regularly spend their smerits.
**By the way, since January 2018, besides my tending to post several times a day, I have sent more than 52,000 smerits (I think averaging around 17 smerits per day), and sure there are some other members with similar numbers, yet mine are pretty close to 1 smerit per post... .. so it can take a quite a bit of work to sort through if any posts might be merit worthy (from my perspective).. and maybe that I don't always understanding all of the contents of the posts that I merit or whether some of the posts might be being made by bad people (or not people at all).2) If you think in hindsight that you merited some bad accounts, my proposal was to wait and watch a bit longer before you send merits to newer account. It might increase the chance that you merit quality accounts only.
Sure some bad smerits end up getting sent out from time to time, and if I realize that they are bad merits or sent to bad members then I probably would discontinue sending smerits to that member to the extent that I believe that they are bad or that something is wrong with their account, but ultimately it is within my discretion to determine those kinds of matters, and whether I understand all posts or members or the situations of members might not even be anything that I am claiming that I know about, unless I come across some information or some information comes to my attention. I am not asking for members to send me pms and tell me which members I should not send smerits... or which members might be bots or which members might be affiliated with other accounts that have been banned from the forum or which members might be engaging in plagiarism... yet sometimes that kind of information comes to my attention, so I will figure out whether or not to stop or slow down in my sending of smerits to those kinds of members.
3) I had the feeling that you are able to differentiate between good and bad accounts even more than you admitted
Which suggests some kind of bad faith or that I am not doing enough due diligence (which suggest that I have a responsibility to do more due diligence than I am doing, to the extent that I might or might not be doing any, not that I even have to.... and do you really think that there is a forum standard that source members are obligated to screen members more thoroughly before sending them smerits?
If there are worries that some members are getting on signature campaigns and receiving pay for their crappy posts, and sure that might be true. Am I supposed to figure out what signature campaign managers should do in regards to accepting members to their campaign?
I am not going to admit that I need to try harder than whatever I am already doing or that I need to report what I am doing or not doing, since there is likely no evidence at all to show bad faith or that I am engaging in purposeful propping up of bad accounts for nefarious reasons or even that I need to change anything that I am doing in spite of nutildah's ongoing whining about such topic for a few years now.. perhaps longer..
yeah, I also prefer to do the 1 smerit thing. So I see that that naturally comes with difficulties when you have a lot to distribute as a merit source.
Sometimes I just thought, and probably users like nutilda as well, "why is JJG meriting this so obviously merit farming account?"
Which might be not so obvious when you have to go through many new accoutns and decide if to merit
