In addition to activity, everyone now has a merit score, and you need both a certain activity level and a certain merit score in order to reach higher member ranks. The required scores are:
| Rank | Required activity | Required merit |
| Brand new | 0 | 0 |
| Newbie | 1 | 0 |
| Jr Member | 30 | 0 |
| Member | 60 | 10 |
| Full Member | 120 | 100 |
| Sr. Member | 240 | 250 |
| Hero Member | 480 | 500 |
| Legendary | Random in the range 775-1030 | 1000 |
You get merit points when someone sends you some for one of your posts. Additionally, when someone sends you merit points,
half of those points can be sent by you to other people.
Certain users are designated as "merit sources". They can create new merit out of nothing, up to a limited number per month (which differs per source). I will not be posting a definitive list of merit sources (so that people don't bug them too much), though you'll soon figure out who they are if you pay attention.
There is currently no such thing as a "demerit". I'm hoping that the positive merits alone will be fine. I could add demerits pretty easily later on if necessary, though.
I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
- Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.
While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively
high-quality, not just posts that you
agree with.
The forum ranking system is a bit complicated now... It'd be nice if someone made an infographic explaining activity and merit.
If you want to be a merit source:Collect TEN posts that have not received nearly enough merit for how good they are, and post quotes for them all in a new Meta thread.
Trivia:For current members, your initial merit score is equal to the minimum required to your rank. Of that, a certain amount (less than the usual half) is spendable. The spendable amount was calculated based on your current rank and the number of activity points you earned in the last year. A Legendary member who hasn't posted in the last year would still be Legendary, but would not have any spendable merit.
If someone sends you 1 merit, the 0.5 sMerit is not wasted; it is just not shown until you get another merit point.
Cool way to implement a method by which you will try to get better comments out of the forum in general, also values other peoples comments more etc based on their general level of participation. May be worth implementing the compensatory system on the negative side as well as you had suggested - to show people when someone is creating threads and posts with very nebulous or indeterminate concepts/questions just for the sake of gaining a post (to level their account up)
If your desire is to be less punitive you can do it as a here after etc - i.e. after x date we will be measuring this as a metric.
Will also discourage the post "noise" which I think you may desire to cut out
