I think in order to keep users serious we should make it to where their account here is an investment. We can get rid of the newbie board and assume a user that registers and pays for membership considers this community valuable and will return a similar amount of value in return.

Another side benefit of this is that it would pay for forum hosting easily and possibly with some profit on the side for the project.

Thoughts?

Basically, people randomly receive 5 moderator points. When they read posts, you can use a point to change the rating of a post +/- 1 (min -1, max 5), but you can only change the same post once. You also can choose an adjective to describe the change, such as "funny" "off-topic" "troll" "insightful", etc. The odds of getting the 5 points are based on the number of posts you make, how well those posts are rated, and some other factors I don't remember. You lose the points after 24 hours, and you can't receive moderation more than either 1/day or 1/everyfewdays.

Meta moderation can be done by anyone. Basically, you get a random set of posts, as well as the moderation done to it. So you'll see a post on the "[exalted] sux" thread where someone made a funny joke, but the moderator knocked it down a point as saying "off-topic". You can than choose whether the moderator was fair with the moderation or not. This, in turn, affects the odds of the person getting moderator points in the future. Note that the name of the moderator is not given.

It works really well, gives some benefit to those that make good points by increasing their odds of getting moderator points, and is difficult to abuse. Slashdot has near a million subscribers, and regularly sees thousands of posts each day, so the system has been decently tested.