Thats a nice idea!

Or add a link to this thread, when people click the "Merit" link in their profiles.

Thank you for the merit:)

There's nothing wrong with your account.  Perhaps if you read about how the merit system works, you'll figure out that you now need merit points in addiction to activity in order to rank up.

The hard part is earning merit, because for that you have to write interesting/important/informative posts AND you're at the mercy of other people giving you merit for those posts.  So good luck.  Yes, it's now much harder to rank up, but this is the way it's supposed to be.

In what forums here can one make post to earn merits

In theory, you might be right. In practice, there are more high quality post which don't receive any merits than those that have received merits.

Looking through the forums and the posts, I noticed that one is MUCH more likely to get noticed and receive merits, if you start a new topic. Hope this will not lead to unintended consequence of people abandoning discussions early.

This is also a solution, but something has to be done to stop this madness. Hope that the admin and the people here agree with me about this. I think that still a lot of people are not aware of the change and will continue posting same questions about merit for a very long time.

I believe its admins and top bitcointalk forum staff are to be the ones to allocate merits to members, that how the merit system will be free of bias situtations.

Actually in thinking about it, one simple fix will actually make the merit system work. If you reduce account activity by the amount of merit NOT distributed every two weeks, it would highly encourage people to distribute merit. At the same time it might be a pain for users that have a lot to distribute but that is a separate issue.

Something like this has to be implemented for it actually to work in practice. Right now there is only incentive for abuse and power hoarding.

As I said somewhere in this thread, at the beginning I didn't like the system, because it seemed to me too hard to rank up.
But now I'm starting to appreciate the system, even if I see that there is some space for improvement.
And as  it's in the real interest of everyone (out of spammers and shitposters...) to have a better forum, I think that we all - instead of complaining - should try to make the system work and to make proposals for improvements.

Now: one of the biggest problem I see, is the fact that - to receive a merit - you need not only to write a good post, but also to have the luck that it will be read by someone that appreciates it and has merit to give.
This is very difficult, due to the enormous number of posts and threads: even with the new system, lot of people still write a big number of useless post just to respect the commitments with the bounty, and your "wonderful" post will be lost between them.

Well, I see that there is a zone of the forum, the "Serious discussion" where there is no signature and your posts don't count for the campaign.
Now it has a very limited number of threads, but it seems to me that it would be a very good idea to expand this area and to encourage its use. (of course, every one could do this by his own initiative, but - for example - I'd feel a little intimidated to start a thread in a so "elitarian" zone; but I could make a post, if I had something to say as answer).

It seems to me a win win solution: we'll have a clean zone, where spammers and shitposters won't have any reason to post, and good poster would be motivated and stimulated to write high quality posts with more chances to be read from right people.

What do you think?