Badges for good reporters are not bad ideas. However, to prevent any kind of abusements with report badges, all badges should not give any kind of benefits for reporters, whom qualitied report enough to earn such badges. Then, it will be good. People will keep doing their daily stuffs, reporting when they see spam posts, and someday, they earn new badges. That's all and fine because such badges only give them honor and fun, without financial benefits.
I hope Epochtalk will be lively before the halving of bitcoin.
I think it is thing can not be discussed here. If theymos have needs, he will hire more staffs for our forum. One of bad things to find new staffs, especially in local boards is it's hard to find good users and qualify them due to language limitations of current mod team (I remembered I read admin / staffs wrote it). It's terrible if new staffs abused the forum, and scam others. Fortunately, merit system maybe helpful in such screening procedure to find new staffs.