@PowerGlove, could you help please?
Sure, I'd like to help with this. As theymos has
said before, when he initially set aside time to implement reporter badges, he realized that a proper implementation would take more effort than he could justify spending at the time.
As I understand it, other than some (relatively) easy-to-handle complications (like letting members opt out, if they like) the main problem is what to do about people trying to earn the badges in ways that wouldn't be helpful to the forum (and might even be harmful). Offering status and recognition for a high number of moderation reports is likely to stimulate unnecessary reporting and inspire dishonest types to think up low-effort ways to earn these badges.
The best solution I've been able to come up with so far is to introduce a new kind of merit (rMerit, and its sendable form: srMerit) and base the earning of badges on that. That way, mods can send you rMerit according to how useful your report was. If the mods have a consistent policy on how to distribute rMerit (i.e. sending none for unhelpful reports, and being generous with reports that are truly useful) then I think that would condition people away from the behaviors that theymos would like to avoid.
There would probably have to be some kind of rMerit airdrop to reward people that have already put a lot of effort into cleaning up the forum. This would ideally be handled manually because applying an automatic exchange rate (e.g. 1 good report = 1 rMerit) is unlikely to produce fair results. Maybe the airdrop could be handled in a latent way, with mods reviewing old reports and selectively sending rMerit for them slowly over time (probably only for members that have "applied" for airdrop consideration, otherwise it would create far too much work for the mods). Of course, another way to go would be to skip the airdrop altogether and just start everyone off on a clean slate.
I don't have access to the modified version of SMF that Bitcointalk runs on, and implementing the above as a patch against SMF 1.1.19 is unlikely to produce something that theymos would merge, so my hands are a little tied. I'm happy to work on implementing the above, but (realistically) I can only do so at theymos' request.
Edit: Some people think this proposal is unnecessarily complicated, so I’ll try to justify its complexity a little: The current system is effectively binary; you get 0 or 1 "point" for every post you report. That means that someone who has reported 1000 posts with malware links is "graded" the same way as someone who has reported 1000 ancient posts for violating the "double posting" rule. One kind of activity is really valuable to the forum, the other
much less so. The "rMerit" idea is about adding more granularity to the system, so that the difference in value can be exposed and the "right" kind of reports can be incentivized and rewarded properly. At first glance, this would seem to have little to do with reporter badges, but if theymos' concerns are valid, then this additional granularity turns out to be an essential ingredient (IMHO) in preventing (or, at least discouraging) people from trying to earn these badges in the lowest-effort way possible.