Looks like theymos thinks that the current merit source situation is fine. No new sources were added since I open my application exactly 1 year ago. Don't see any upcoming changes either. I wasn't that active the past couple of months but now I'm back and hoping to get an answer to the merit source question soon.

Looking at the crypto markted and the alt season I thoght that there will be bigger interest for the forum and more new members will join, most of them will be for bounties and spam but somewhere in between there will be a good, valuable ones too. Looking back at 2017 I think we are seeing even greater times now so for sure more people will join for good or for bad (I hate scammers).

I have made this statement many times analysing the monthly statistics for the Italian board: I thought a rise in price would have lead to more interest on the forum. Well, I think there is a gap between the forum, as a tool, the "newbies" in the Bitcoin sphere, who probably, mainly for age-related habits, prefer to use other media like youtube or Telegram chat to source their information on Bitcoin.

I tried several times to post links pointing towards the forum on such Telegram chats, or even Twitter, but the answers I got were quite disappointing as everybody liked more the continuous chatter of the Telegram rather than the more insightful views the forum can give.

You could drop me on the list, as I was finally able to manage my source.

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Don't know about the others, as I have notice something awful in the past few months, others might have noticed it already and still I won't say who...
And lastly, IMO the baby can be a better replacement for that.

I'm absolutely confused as to what you're referring to--but I'm damn curious.

Anyway, I need more source sMerits.  They were getting replenished very quickly for a while, and then it just kind of stopped.  Fortunately I have plenty of personal sMerits which I'll probably have to tap into within the next week or so if I don't get a top-up from Theymos.  I'm a-still tryin' to be a good merit source, and I think I've gotten off to a good start this year and I'm going to try to do even better as far as distributing the merits far and wide (though I'm not lowering my standards).

I tend to agree with you, especially since I saw that there was a large number of merit sources who dropped out in the past 6 months to a year or so.  Hopefully Theymos isn't having second thoughts about the merit system--you never know, because he doesn't give his thoughts on the matter all that often.

I don't know, I opened my Merit Source Application last January and it's been over a year no information at all. Gmaxwell mentioned that he will push theymos to add new sources and that was in may. Everyone thought that it will be a 6 months period for the adjustments but we were wrong.
I decided that I'll bump my MS application only once a year. Until then I'll be giving away what I earn, like i'm doing all the time. When I empty the stash I just..

Who is a source and how many sources is up to theymos, and sources can be active in any board - though theymos may well select someone to either be a source or to increase their source smerits based on which parts of the forum that they have been historically active.

It seems that theymos has not made any significant changes to the sources for a year and a half.. (around November 2019)?..  .. and so many members have suggested that merit sources should be more spread out and even theymos has made statements in that direction to say that he had intended to increase the number of merit sources, but has not really caused him to significantly increase the quantity of merit sources beyond one point having a peak of about 130 merit sources, but currently appears to be around 97 merit sources. 

Also, have not heard from theymos recently on the merit source(s) topic, so difficult to know if his current thinking is changing or if he is contemplating making any kind of meaningful or significant change in the near future, even if several members may be hoping for some kinds of changes to take place in lines of what you have just said either increasing the number of merits, increasing the number of sources or both.

If I am not wrong we are approaching the 18th month-iversary of the last source reshuffle.
Theymos hinted at some sort of merit allowance rebalancing, let's see what happens.
18 months is a long interval, and while I saw some merit source asking for more, I also been hinted at some fatigue by others.

I am curious.

P.s. Asking for more.

Active Merit sources can't make up for inactive sources, so the inactive users should be replaced.

Part of the reason merit distribution is declining is because merit is being received by people who are inactive. Otherwise, merit distribution is declining because people are not spending sMerit as they receive merit.

As merit sources don’t spend their source sMerit, less new merit enters into the ecosystem. If all active merit sources spend all their merit, and the inactive sources don’t spend any, it would appear that source merit is not being spent when looking at the data, but there would be missing context.