So we would be able to expect new donator ranks which are indeed the lower-cost donator ranks with these Paid-Memberships being introduced any time soon?
Something between Donator & Copper, which would grant you something like a custom title for donating / supporting to the forum?
im sure many people would be willing to pay a small fee for the option of being able to set a custom title, i know i would. then again, i could see this feature being abused by scammers and such to seem more trusted and stuff, maybe only allowing certain member ranks to have this option available might be a good idea.
People will try and abuse anything but I think the positives will outweigh the negatives. I have suggested being able to change your name being included with a premium level rank (amongst other benefits), but I know that
could be abused but would it be worth the risk of the price of the premium rank? To counter abuse, usernames could be limited to only being changed once every six months etc and they possibly have to be approved by a staff member/global mod/admin etc. Every time a custom title is changed maybe it could go in a que to also be checked.
now, the feature we should really be looking for next is donating to set one's gender to attack helicopter.
Ha, this is a human right.
The true way to win is make the value of posts equal nil by banning signature campaigns
[Authoritarian sometimes does work]
I wouldn't have been against banning them completely, but theymos seems to be against this and is very unlikely to do it. Personally, I would prefer for more restrictions being put on them and many ways have been suggested by staff but we can't really do anything without theymos' approval or him giving more powers out to people.
More moderators or introduce automation can at least treat the symptoms better now.
More mods and admins are needed (or more importantly some of the workload needs to be distributed amongst the current mods). Some boards don't even have any mods assigned at all.
I don't think some sort of rewards for reporting posts would be a bad idea, but as you said some people would find a way to exploit it. However, those that do report accurately and frequently will have the possibility of becoming a mod at some point which has its financial benefits (but mods are rarely promoted so many probably give up or lose interest (not that they should be reporting purely for that but it's largely a thankless and time-consuming task)).
But seriously, is there any automation in place? I mean, should we start collaborating strings to search for in posts to help automate it?
There is some limited automation but it's not ideal. Any efficient moderation needs to be done manually and is very time consuming as I'm sure you can imagine.