I actually would like an even stricter Merit system: a system were you need to continuously earn merits to be and stay a certain rank. A system where you are never done earning, because only your last 3-6 months are counted. This would remove a lot of paid spam.
In the past I supported similar ideas, but now I am against them again - the problem is that you always punish honest people with such a system, mostly members who wear signatures which are un-paid, and visit this forum not so frequently. Like most of the Core developers, for example ...
The goal of "decaying merits" is obviously to rank-down accounts which achieved a high rank automatically by spamming (via Activity) before the merit system was introduced. That goal can be achieved also by other, less drastic means. As people told me, what is currently being done is that the worst spammers/farmers are (slowly) being banned. So in a couple of months we can expect that only few "farmed Legendaries/Heroes" will be left.
I am currently beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel - the usually megathread-dominated "Bitcoin Discussion" subforum seemed, today, a bit more interesting that it used to be in the last months. At least a handful of serious threads at the first page. Maybe it's beginning to work
