Sorry I haven't expanded on my basic concept. I left it deliberately vague because I was interested in community feed back, and I am grateful for all of the replies.
Part of the problem is that Bitcoin Talk is a large and established forum, and it has a diverse membership, with vast range of skills and abilities. It is also multi-lingual, but with a big advantage for English speakers. The structure has evolved over the years, and any changes must be implemented with considerable care. At the moment there are several methods of rating members, and there is some interaction between them. These are -
Ranking - A reflection of the seniority and activities of members, and higher ranks gain benefits for forum participation.
Activity - this is the primary tool for ranking, and it includes a 14 day cap to prevent prolific posted from rocketing up the ranks.
Merit - This is a blocking system, and is designed to allow the community to decide on members who should be allowed to increase their rank. There is no scope for a demerit function,as this would lead to the obvious abuses.
Trust - This was intended to report on the trustworthiness of members who are active traders. Recently it has become a ranking for the moral fibre of members, and has become the victim of abusive and vindictive reports.
Moderation - This takes up quite a bit of time for moderators and staff, and seems to be limited to post editing or deletion.
Post reporting - A voluntary action by some members, and intended to help the moderators.
Banning and blocking - A fairly extreme last resort for admins
SMF includes a shop plugin, and my idea is to use this to introduce some control over forum benefits. If the shop had a token - lets call it a PAR ( Posting Activity Reward ), then PAR could be spent to purchase benefit such as monthly signature use. This would have some side benefits, for example, if expired signatures were removed automatically from inactive or deleted accounts, then that could remove links to old scam projects. The moderators would have an additional tool that isn't as extreme as deleting a post. They could remove the award for an "under par" post, and this may discourage low value bumping replies.
I'm sure you guys can think of some other advantages that wouldn't be too disruptive to the existing system.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. I list some of what you say below with a few small corrections.
Let's take these
Ranking - A reflection of the seniority and activities of members, and higher ranks gain benefits for forum participation.
was an objective metric applied the same for everyone until merit got some sway over it.
Activity - this is the primary tool for ranking, and it includes a 14 day cap to prevent prolific posted from rocketing up the ranks.
This is no longer the primary tool for ranking up it is now impotent without merit with regards rank.
Merit - This is a blocking system, and is designed to allow the community to decide on members who should be allowed to increase their
rank. There is no scope for a demerit function,as this would lead to the obvious abuses.
I agree this is exactly what merit is it decides who has what rank and therefore who can paid2post and at what level. I will speculate a lot of new users are no interested in high rank to demonstrate they have been here a long time and have been very active helping us push toward and end to end trustless decentralised arena but really just want higher rank to get higher rates of paid2post.
However you can not provide motive for selfish and unfair meriting and give no criteria nor punishment for not following the mandate and the criteria. This system has broken the objective nature of ranking up and replaced it with one that helps control newbie spam to a degree but now has opened the entire thing up to wide abuse with no comeback,
Why would demerit be open to abuse any more than merit?? you can not abuse a system with no rules and no set criteria. To me demerit would actually help balance the system. I would have merit sources 50% legends and demerit powered individuals 50% legends. I would then mandate the demerit club to remove merits where they have been awarded to posts that are proven to have been incorrect or based on false assumptions and on people who clearly abuse the merit system. Legends have more to lose so should act according to mandate or not act at all or face account getting perm banned or no sigs ever again for them.
Trust - This was intended to report on the trustworthiness of members who are active traders. Recently it has become a ranking for the moral fibre of members, and has become the victim of abusive and vindictive reports.
agree 100% another subjective system with no clear criteria nor punishment for abusing the mandate and criteria set. To me this system should be related only to financial scams where you have clear evidence this person is demonstrating behaviour which will lead to them scamming money from you. Any other red trust issue needs a clear set of criteria and punishment for not using trust as the criteria and mandate specifies.
The only way to fix it all up is to take subjectivity out of any system of control. You allow subjectivity you allow abuse.
Of course at a top level of control ie judge or mod or theymos then sensible human consideration will make final important decisions on any grey areas .......this though is fair because they are not motivated to be in competition with normal users and will. Also when you just have one mind looking at things from their own perspective at the board the board gets the same appraisal. This does not happen when you have 100's of people all motivated to act selfishly and are in competition with those they are controlling.
I do though think you bring up some very good points and PAR is good so long as it is given objective criteria that people need to go by. If par alone controls sigs and will be based on objective analysis of posts I like it.
I still say merit if left subjective with no punishment even for blatant abuse.. needs to be decoupled from rank after snr. Rank should be an objective measure not controlled by others who benefit from the ranking system.
PAR - i like it if we will not attempt to make merit an objective useful score right now and PAR can easily be implemented.
Of course I believe always with financial reward you will be fighting against people trying to game the system for more money and not caring about damaging our environment for debate and conversation in a natural way. But we can try our best.
Your par is actually though a FAR BETTER solution than many others I have read and i would give you merits but I am almost run out now and I don't know when I get more filled up to give away again. I seem to have given most of it away already.
