Congrats, you're now a jr. member as well.

Again; not the highest quality post history but you are active in a variety of threads (not only bounty) since May 2018, so I don't think you should still be a newbie.

To be fair, you've only ever posted in VOLP coin and never anywhere else. That's not really the best way to get merit...be a part of the community, not just your own coin! 

Based on your account history, you've only made posts for bounty entries since April (5 months) and started participating in other threads since the 12th of September. If you keep that up for a couple of weeks, I'm sure you'll get merits soon enough.

This is absolutely right thing to increase merit. I am very sad for demote newbie.

That's the right decision. Finally, multi-million army of bots and multi-accounts will disappear. I'm for fair play. Also, this will lead to a decrease in spam and the appearance of better content on the forum.

Wow I've got merit thanks sir for checking my post history, I will post more quality post to have a great and helpful community.

Very Welcome move.  Interesting to see Jr. Member demoted to newbie.
If spam continues, I think in future Theymos might demote Members too (raising limit to 50) or decaying default merits in gradual phase.
Anyways, it give a important message of stop spamming.

@theymos, it is great to hear from you with this change which will surely result in a huge reduction of spam. We need to mention @hilariousetc for his/her contribution and the impact he/she put up on the theymos for initiating this new requirement.

Now I see this thread itself becoming a merit source thread where all the newbies trying to post here to get their first merit. I have a mixed feeling about that scenario because I don't want to see this thread is ultimately becoming a SMT where filled with newbies requests. Meanwhile, its good to see other members giving away their sMerits for the Newbies who really deserved to be ranked up.

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Edit - "Very good move theymos give me merits" - Newbie

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I have a suggestion, do we need to discuss those new requirements what theymos already been implemented. Because he is the boss admin and I don't see any requirement to continue this conversation since anyone here cannot change anything(There is nothing to be changed either, @theymos hit the nail on the head). It's okay to discuss any restrictions or requirements before its implementation and take other members opinions regarding the best possible way of implementation (If theymos felt that matter to be discussed before implementation).

Users already can rank up from "Brand new" to "Newbie" without any merits . Oops.. if you are talking about ranking from "Newbie" to "Jr. Member" I don't think that's a good idea and we don't need to go backwards. Why are we allowing users to ranked up just by wasting time in the forum? Merit system also needs some tweaks but the answer is not implementing the activity system again which has been failed. The forum is a much better place if theymos introduced Merit system earlier than its initial introduction.

I also somewhat agreed with you but why only signatures we also need to consider bounty reports which also attributes heavily towards spam.

Dear Legendary @vlom, don't think in that way and spare few minutes of your time for newbies too. Because I have seen those good newbies still missed their first merit even they deserved it, unfortunately, some of the members didn't have sMerits to spend.