Then perhaps there should be an additional merit requirement for the reporter board. Something low like 20 merits so as to not inconvenience legitimate users but it would be a significant hurdle for bot farmers.
Another option (if SMF allows) would be to make it invite-only and manually approve participants.
This would certainly make it a lot harder for bot-like increases to get into something like this, as they hopefully will not be getting any merit. Although, why not just go by rank, needs to be a Jr. Member + X number of reports (I don't really want to guess on a number because I'd prefer to see everyones current counts first
).
There have been 5 posts on the Donators board so far in 2018. I made 3 of them...
This may be something temporary at this point in time, similar to donator, which I'm *assuming* may have had more activity in the past when it was created? or no?
Regardless, it doesn't mean this type of reporters board wouldn't be more active now, and wouldn't cost someone 10BTC to get into
. It seems like it would be a positive step towards cleaning the forum up, assuming it creates enough additional people reporting to close the gap on the bot/spam activity.
Keep in mind, I'll probably never make it into any reporters board. I'm not what one would consider an "active reporter"... at least I don't think I am?... I report posts, but not as often as I probably should. I need to balance my time/life, and unfortunately reporting posts is not at the top of my priority list when reading through various threads. For me, (because I probably overanalyze everything) the thought process that goes along with reporting posts eats up too much of my time (and distracts me from the reason I'm reading the thread in the first place).
IMO, it is the mods/staff job... they are the paid
experts. But, when you hear that others are essentially incentivizing bots to post crap, it doesn't seem like a fair fight. Probably not a fair fight even without the bots... but, if there are those with time willing to dig their heels in to help the mods/staff do their job, more power to them.