You can get 50 smerit with a good post and you can make 0 smerit with 50 low-medium quality posts.
It depends and in my opinion, people here (including me) prefer to give smerit to low ranks rather than the highest one. I remember declining to merit so many good posts because the OP was a legendary...and I am pretty sure many did the same.
You cannot blame the system when most of people here don't care about the forum, nor contribute to the discussions here. They are simply joining bounties and spamming bitcointalk with their plagiarised texts.

all right, thank you for this information. Now it's harder to get higher rank

It's a PHP function. It takes the minimum between your posts count and time*14. If 2 activity periods passed It will be like this: (2*14, 41) = min(28, 41) and It's going to take 28 as your activity.

You can only gain 14 activity per two weeks period and that's why your activity is not increasing anymore.

Can you maybe add the perks of being a copper member? Also, any plans for a Bronze, Silver, or Gold member with according prices?

Thank you for this.   This is really helpful.  I just want to ask about the duration of "activity period".

Ah! Thank you very much, this explains a lot... Is it correct that 'activity periods' are from monday to sunday, and have a two week span?

Please do not quote the whole long post !
When you press quote to respond to someone, you can edit or delete the content like this

[.quote author=John (John K.) link=topic=178608.msg1861412#msg1861412 date=1366178094]
....
[.quote]

You can change (...) by (-snip-) or by the sentence that you want to respond to.

Thanks its a big help

Wouldn't call it a joke 7 years ago, you are too late like most of the people here. Besides, 50 BTC is always 50 BTC but if you are converting it to fiat and comparing then it is another story.
Better to improve the quality of your future posts son or else you will stuck as junior member forever.