I saw a post by Welsh saying that moderation reports have been in decline and that he misses the days when he woke up to hundreds of reports in his queue. It got me thinking of ways to jump-start it again.

So, the idea would be for each user to have a "millimerit" balance (either hidden from view, or maybe visible next to the existing report accuracy numbers). Moderators could then award members with say 25 millimerits for any good report and -100 for any bad report.

The balance can (maybe, not sure) go negative, so you would have to "work off" each of your bad reports to get back above zero and each time you accumulate 1000 millimerits (40 good reports) the balance gets reset and you're awarded one real merit.

The thing I like about this system is that it can be completely ignored by the reporters that don't need an incentive (they can just pretend the system doesn't exist and keep doing their thing; it changes nothing for them except that they'll receive an extra merit once in a while). But, it might encourage others to spend their time cleaning up the forum, too. The steep carrot/stick ratio is to prevent would-be abusers from gaining any traction.

The specific values will need discussion/tuning so that there's just the right amount of incentive; too little and it obviously won't jump-start anything, too much and it would likely lead to excessive reporting.

An interesting consequence of a system like this is that it would probably compel a decent fraction of merit-seeking newbies to thoroughly learn the forum's rules.

This proposal touches code that I don't have access to, so I'm unable to provide a patch like I normally would, but it's a nice idea and I thought it would be worth sharing.