Brilliant idea! I think reporting posts and threads is a great feature on this forum that is not used enough. I try to use more but often times I just forget about it and scroll through lines and lines of one-liners, spam, "Great project Sir" posts, so that I find the information that I need. But we took time and report those useless posts, the quality and usefulness would be much better. Reporting of scam attempts is even more important, of course.
So yeah, I think small reward with Merits would be good way to encourage reporting. Maybe
3 Merit per 10 accepted reports?
In order to prevent report-hunting
a user would get warning after 3 false reports and ban after 6 false reports or something like that. Moderators are the people who decide for each report and I haven't seen any complaints on their report-solving so far.
According to
forum rules, account sales are discouraged. And most Moderators have opinion that account that was bought is a threat to other users because they might trust him because of rank or post history, which in reality is work of someone else so such bought accounts are not trustworthy and often times get Red trust. And I agree with you, it is a way of cheating and I am against it.
I am somehow against this. Although you proposed something to prevent report hunters, i don't think reward system would stop them. The main purpose of the merit system is to push everybody to post quality posts to gain merits and to discourage shit posters by not letting them rank up easily.
Why am i against this?
1. People would have another choice to increase their merits. Therefore, they may
rely on hunting spammers, abusers, etc. on gaining merits.
Instead of improving or changing their way of posting if there are much easier ways to gain merits.
2. Moderators/admin would have another task to manage. Imagine the majority report hunting to gain merits, admins/moderators would have tons of report to check plus mass reporting may caused headache to the mods (more than 1 account may report a single spammer). Or even worse, mass reporting can be abused by group of people who are bullying some accounts.
Sorry if i'm against this, best regards!