[quote=@Mahz] I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm going to implement a trust system so that I can give trusted members more privileges while restricting the privileges of potential spammers (i.e. new users). My core philosophy is that trusted users (i.e. users that have no record of system abuse, users trusted by the system) should be given a full toolkit to use as they see fit. If a trusted user wants to start convos with 10+ people and all 10+ people are down with that (i.e. it's not abuse), then the system should let them do that. - New members are considered untrusted. They can only create a convo every 60 seconds (or some duration). They can only create a convo with 1 other participant. This is to put the final nail in the coffin of a special class of PM spammers. - As a member participates in the community, they become more trusted and unlock more privileges. - Gaining trust needs to be slow enough to punish people that get banned (they have to start from scratch), but it shouldn't feature-starve new users from basic functions. - Trusted users should be able to expedite the trust process by "vouching" for users. Vouching for someone will boost their trust a fraction of your trust and put you on their vouch list that mods can see. If done right, this system will be simple and nearly invisible. Current users will notice nothing different but enhanced privileges, mods will have a better toolkit for evaluating bad actors, the system will be harder to abuse, and new users will unlock more features as they get acclimated to the community. As the guild rapidly climbs back to its pre-guildfall activity levels, I'd like to get this sort of system in place sooner than later. (I spent a lot of time hacking similar countermeasures into oldguild's vBulletin) [/quote] Hmm. Ambitious. Certainly, users can tend to rack up a lot of posts in Spam or Free RPs. This could skew the system towards escalated privileges for these users, unless you implemented a weighting system for boards. It might be awkward and lead to some grumbling, but it would slow down the advance of someone formerly banned by simply posting heavily in Spam. You could do other things to accelerate users into trusted groups by detecting things that generally denotes thoughtful/helpful posts. Things like posting length, internal links to the Guild, or number of ratings a single post receives might add weight to someone's current trust level and boost them up faster. Perhaps these weights would be calculated randomly, so that not every post that satisfies the thresholds would be counted, allowing for a more realistic measure of trust and avoiding the ability to game the system. Honestly, I think the number one criteria for such a system is to keep its details hidden. Not that Guild members aren't trustworthy (indeed, that's the entire point of this measure) or that you must have secrets. But simply that such an invisible system should be like a black box to users. At some point, they get awarded with more trust, and huzzah! But the actual steps taken to that point shouldn't be possible to replicate exactly or document so that someone else could game the system. My $0.02, given freely.