I was thinking along the lines of "tally marks"
Actually, tally marks are associated with imprisonment or some sort of durance (at least for me). I doubt that reporters wear the striped suits.:)
top rank would look like Pacman chasing all 4 ghosts
Or maybe ghosts added one by one and Pacman in the end like the final prize for the highest rank.:)
Unfortunately, it's unlikely to be implemented since Pacman itself is for sure law protected (unlike ghosts - untill their appearance doesn't resemble jellyfishes I guess).
This time the idea is a helping hand. Reporting is kind of supporting or helping the mods/admins to keep the forum clean
Stars are simple - something that we call "lying on surface". Though it's not bad of course.
Helping hand is... conceptual. But I'm not sure that it's meaning is obvious.
Medals it's cool
Personally I don't like medals, shoulder straps, stripes on sleeves, cops caps, sheriff badges and other stuff that concerns militarism and other attributes of "duty persons". Reporting is not duty related yet, and these symbols are too strict.
Does the forum keep track of the reason why users have been banned in the past?
Probably (at least I know that other SMF-forums
have their internal banlists). But it seems that mods
have to write the ban reason themselves (if it's not autoban), so it'd be difficult to align the badges with particular reasons (the static list of reasons to choose from is needed for that). Or it could be realized as additional option so mods can choose the badge for every ban. Thus the list would stick the bandge automatically, but possibly require to rewrite a great banch of code to work. And the option can seriously slow down the mods' work since they'd be distracted by the choice of badges.
Here's what I drew but I'm not sure about the color...
Regarding the megaphone I think that gold should be the one to start from. The second one can be green (of different shade perhaps) and the final one should be red.
1. If this process is introduced then many will report unnecessarily
Why? It's just an image.
2. If anybody does not have any profit by launching this method then why will people report in the name of others?
And why do they even report? It's already a process that doesn't involve thousands.
3. People want to upgrade their rank. He will not see how many reports he has on his profile
People already
can look at their reports' amount if they have 25 good reports or more.
4. If you use a symbol, it will be in a limitation, there will be no Count of how many reports it has made, in which case a person can stop by a limited report
Something tells me that those who have thousands of reports don't think about limits. And I doubt that image can change this.