Each user's number of "votes" in the last two criteria will be limited to floor(earned_merit (10 or 250, depending on the criteria)). If you trust more people than your limit, then you will vote for the people to whom your vote will be the most useful, more-or-less.
I wasn't able to find either an optimal or low-error-approximate solution to
this problem. My current algorithm is sub-optimal in general and could produce results uncomfortably far from the optimal solution, but the current data doesn't actually present a scenario where it matters: my current algorithm is optimal with the current data. Long-term, if I can't find an algorithm that I'm happy with, I could make the trust lists ordered as some have suggested.
When building your trust list, I tend to encourage people not to worry about little details like this, and instead just think about the system in broad strokes. If this results in poor outcomes, then that's a problem on my end.
And I want to insist on my suggestion regarding trust: guest should see some trust.
The main reason that I went for this solution rather than forcing custom lists is that I would like to show some trust indicator to guests. But before doing that, I want to see whether these modifications can actually be made to work. If not, then I may go to the force-custom-lists solution, and that's incompatible with guests seeing any trust indicators.
