I've expressed my opinions multiple times on this subject, and have done so recently
here, however that post also addresses some of the issues related to the discussion specific for that thread. So I will give my general reason why this shouldn't happen.
Besides the reasons given above by multiple users. Merit isn't suppose to be a reward for contributing members or even members who are of "good" quality. Merit is a measure of a users ability to post good quality content. Reports do not support this, and represent something different entirely. Users who report without expecting a gain show a desire to improve the forum, and it's community, and as a result improves the readability for everyone.
Possibly users who report could be rewarded some other way; Like a thank you from the mods from time to time perhaps. But, reports shouldn't be rewarded with merit or monetary gain.
If we were to offer an incentive maybe a weekly leader board which is made public. This could be abused of course, but for no real actual gain. It would probably provide a incentive for those who are status hungry, although might prevent some users from reporting as much as they do, because they don't want the attention.
At it's very core it's not a
bad idea rewarding those who report. But, merit certainly isn't the way to go about it. I'm not sure any system would help to be quite honest with you. If we don't care for the motives of people reporting, and only care that people are reporting then possibly the leaderboard or regular updated stats are the way to go about it. A
On the hypothetical that this was introduced, and you could get merit for reporting it certainly would need to be a higher threshold. Something like one thousand reports = 1 merit. That would likely deter those who want to abuse it, and would at the same time reward those who report anyway. Plus, if someone is abusing the report button a thousand times it should be pretty obvious to the staff team, and they could either issue reprimands out or remove the report button on a individual basis.
With your idea, i could earn lots of merit by visiting mega-threads or popular section among spammer and report majority of the posts
So, i'd disagree with your idea. Helping any forum should be voluntarily, don't expect any forms of rewards.
Hmm. Is it necessarily a bad thing if spam is getting reported? Despite the motives behind it? As long as the possibility of abuse is removed then reporting actual spam in hopes to get a small reward, but a reward nonetheless could be alright. (I'm referring to abuse as creation of alt accounts here)
1 thousand reports = 1 merit
or
5 thousand reports = 1 merit.
Then the motives for reporting should not be centered on gaining merit as it would be one hell of a headache to report that many posts. I would generally agree that there shouldn't be any rewards for reporting, but I wouldn't be 100% against it if the work required was a lot higher than the actual reward.
Users such as Lutpin who had like 10k reports? would have 10 merits or 2 merits respectfully which isn't too much of a big deal.
Maybe, we should implement a new stat that goes under merit "Snitch rating"
Nah, that could be a possibility though for those who want to have some credit for how much they report. A optional public display much like the posts/merit/activity displays. "Reports" or something along those lines.
