Original proposalI saw a post by Welsh saying that moderation reports have been in decline and that he misses the days when he woke up to hundreds of reports in his queue. It got me thinking of ways to jump-start it again.
So, the idea would be for each user to have a "millimerit" balance (either hidden from view, or maybe visible next to the existing report accuracy numbers). Moderators could then award members with say 25 millimerits for any good report and -100 for any bad report.
The balance can (maybe, not sure) go negative, so you would have to "work off" each of your bad reports to get back above zero and each time you accumulate 1000 millimerits (40 good reports) the balance gets reset and you're awarded one real merit.
The thing I like about this system is that it can be completely ignored by the reporters that don't need an incentive (they can just pretend the system doesn't exist and keep doing their thing; it changes nothing for them except that they'll receive an extra merit once in a while). But, it might encourage others to spend their time cleaning up the forum, too. The steep carrot/stick ratio is to prevent would-be abusers from gaining any traction.
The specific values will need discussion/tuning so that there's
just the right amount of incentive; too little and it obviously won't jump-start anything, too much and it would likely lead to excessive reporting.
An interesting consequence of a system like this is that it would probably compel a decent fraction of merit-seeking newbies to thoroughly learn the forum's rules.
This proposal touches code that I don't have access to, so I'm unable to provide a patch like I normally would, but it's a nice idea and I thought it would be worth sharing.
Revised proposalThanks for sharing your thoughts, everyone!
It seems like maybe reporter badges would be a better (less abusable) motivator. I'll address reporter badges at the end of this edit.
People have pointed out that reports are down because activity is down in general. That's true, but I still think ideas to motivate reporters are worth discussing.
The system as proposed above would have been automatic (i.e. once a mod marked a report as good or bad, the millimerits would be sent). The -100 penalty for a bad report was there to prevent people from spamming the mods with reports; each bad report "undoing" 4 good reports means that the threshold for profitability is 80% accuracy (i.e. at or below 80% you can't sustainably earn millimerits).
One piece of feedback that torpedoes the original proposal is the possibility of collusion, which I didn't think about. If the reward is handed out automatically, then it's only a matter of time before people start manufacturing posts for others to "report".
I think both of the above problems (the -100 penalty and abuse by collusion) can be solved with a fairly small adjustment:
Get rid of the -100 penalty for a bad report, but instead of the 25 millimerits for a good report being sent automatically, leave it up to the individual moderator's discretion. That way, the mods can spot abuse themselves; if someone spams them with mostly inaccurate reports or if reports seem suspiciously like collusion (e.g. someone keeps reporting new posts from the same user over and over again) then they can decline to issue any millimerits. Maybe the rule could be that when reporting a post, the moderator that handles it has the option of sending you between 0 and 1000 millimerits depending on how useful/valuable your report was. Then (just making up numbers) original reports can get ~60 and redundant (but still good) reports can get ~20, really valuable reports like malware can get ~300, and so on (some moderators would likely be more generous than others).
Reporter badgesA few people mentioned
reporter badges, which I think would be a nice addition to the forum!
Maybe OP can do the heavy lifting for theymos to implement the reporter badges? That would be really cool.
Imho, way more elegant solution to make people report more is to introduce some sort of badges for the most active reporters as that's what people asked for repeatedly.
I was wondering if Gloves could possibly get those patches? I mean, for the images?
Reporters could be recognized with something like the proposed reporters badge of many years ago
Slow down, we reporters have yet to receive our
badge JPEGs promised aeons ago.
However, like adding badges to the profile, there are a lot of option to grow.
A reporter badge would likely be more effective there.
I'm still hopeful that they get implemented at some point.
I support this also.
Well, it's been already 4 years and counting.
Which brings back the question when those badges will be implemented?
I'm for the idea of reporter badges, and I would be willing to spend my time on implementing them (including the ability for people to opt out, if they like). However, I've offered to take things off of theymos' plate before (specifically,
this) and never heard back from him, so I'm not hopeful that he would let me tackle this.