What do you think of providing merit to those who correctly report spam/shill posts that serve no purpose? I think this may end up helping the forum as a whole in the long run and could give some low levels a source of merit. Of course, there is the risk of possibly over-reporting which would lead to mods opposing this as people are just reporting to try to get merit.
I may have talked myself out of it, but I'm interested to see what others have to say about it.
Actually, this sounds like a good idea. And the framework to deal with the potential issue of over-reporting is already in place, in that you are told your accuracy score for reporting each time you report a new post (e.g. - 6 out of 6 for me, last time I checked). So if you have, say, better than 90% accuracy in reporting spam or rules violations then you will receive a merit for each new report submitted (as long as it is accurate, of course).