Bumping this as I think it's a good idea. I'd also like to see more stats rather than just the top 50 for each category.

Yes, definitely! And also in the long-term to have better stats, to both keep us informed and to help improving it.
I don't think it would be too difficult to provide the data, and it will allow all sorts of development.

I want raw data updated every specif amount of time, every day, week, whatever makes sense, so that third party scripts can download it regularly without overloading bitcointalk's server and knowing no data is lost.

I'm more interested in this, actually: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=recent
I wouldn't say easy, but yes it's possible. There are a few problems about doing that though:

• The script must override the logging in and parse the HTML. This can change at any time and the script would stop working
• Because there's no specif amount of time after which the data is updated, the script must download the data regularly, very often. This can cause problems with the anti-DDos system
• If the script downloads data from here, it doesn't know immediately who received the Merit. It would need to open every post to see who the author is, causing a lot of traffic and, again, having problems with the DDoS system

So it would be much more difficult, not very reliable, can stop working at any time and causes much more load to bitcointalk.
Providing raw data (like this) is by far the best solution.

I'm willing to write a Merit script and generate some stats, but I'm really not willing to do so when it represents so much work and knowing it will stop working at any time.

What is this supposed to be? I just see this:

Yes, I know it's possible, even for the page I want (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=merit;stats=recent).
But it's unreliable as I explained in my previous post.

(And you're not really being helpful by just posting the result of the conversion. It could have been done manually for all I know)

The only (possible) downside to this suggestion is that it will probably make unmasking of the merit sources easier.
Theymos didn't want to publish the list, because it could result in them being pestered for merits...

The merit system is still very new, users are still leaning and experimenting with it, and there is the strong potential it will be tweaked in the coming months to address issues discovered.

I believe any effort into tracking stats about the merit economy this early into its life will probably be of little use, and will contain mostly outlier data. After a few months, especially after most of the merit initially given to various users is spent, stats about merit will be more useful.

Here you go: https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xz

Similar to trust.txt.xz, it'll be updated weekly. It will show only the last 120 days of data; someone else should archive the old ones if you want them.

I am especially interested in analyses of this data which could point to sub-communities where the initial sMerit is exhausted and new sources are necessary, and people who might be good merit sources.

Edit: Note that for a little while I had user_to and user_from as names, but I decided to change it to IDs.

Nice, I posted my quick research here:

Merit stats & all transactions more than 40 Merits
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/3046077.0

where I created a histogram to try to see tendencies and a clickable table for all transactions more than 40 Merits.
From the link you can directly check user profile, merit history, and the thread where the large transaction performed.

In total 85524 sMerits have been sent, which is much smaller than 11975 sMerits created by 57 merit sources per month.
It seems that we need more merit sources.

Hi Theymos,

Would you mind giving me link to download full data of the forum related to merit (receivers, senders and their ranks, boards in the forum, etc.). The current ones lack those essential variables, and I don't have skills to get them from the forum raw dataset you gave.
Thank you very much for your help.

Thanks, TheQuin. I am not developers, so I don't have skills to get raw data from website/ forum like this one. I can do good statistical analysis and nice, informative plots for the forum users to get general trend of merit system operation over the last two months. But I can only do it if I get data.
It is likely that I can't get it. Anyway, thanks again for your thread.