moderation reports have been in decline and that he misses the days when he woke up to hundreds of reports in his queue.
There's less spam (and much less posts in general). In the past week,
35,000 posts were made.
4 years ago, there were 280,000 posts per week (that's 8 times more).
Moderators could then award members with say 25 millimerits for any good report
I see opportunities for selling spam bots and reporting bots to farm Merit.
and -100 for any bad report.
Punishing people for making an effort is bad. I already dislike it when one of my reports is marked as "Bad".
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.
A cleaner forum should be enough incentive. Or the joy of getting spammers banned.
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.
Learning forum rules shouldn't be the primary reason to be here.
Let's stick with just this:
I'm hoping that this system will increase post quality by:
- Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.
- Highlighting good posts with the "Merited by" line.
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.
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