[quote]So that people will actually read your status, I'm thinking of including it as a small button next to the "bio" button. When clicked, it can pop up a small window that shows the status with a small form that allows you to comment on it or rate it like you can a post. Perhaps the button even saturates into some color when you haven't read the user's latest status.

What do yall think? Any better ideas for how the status should be displayed on posts? It'd be possible to display the [possibly truncated] status directly on the post, but I'm reluctant to add clutter to posts.[/quote]	I'd rather have it as hover-over tooltip for PC (disappears as soon as you move off the element) and tap-activated tooltip for touch-devices (goes away as soon as you tap anywhere but the button), also visible on profile above the bio; popup windows tend to be somewhat more annoying even when you can dismiss them with one button-press/tap/click. It being a popup-window rather than hover-over element will make me significantly less likely to actually ever look at those things, whereas hover-over statuses such as seen on Skype or the forum I'm thinking of below I occasionally do read them. (You can CSS-style tooltips, so appearances shouldn't be a problem.)
	I've seen a quite functional forum-implementation of something very similar with the avatar working like the status not-button element described above - although the element being avatar rather than a thing with the word "status" written on it underneath the avatar tends to result in new people discovering the feature every now and then. 
	Uhh... But commenting and rating statuses? Don't like that thought. Far too social media gimmick for my tastes. (Whatever would even happen to these hypthetical comments and ratings whenever an user changes status - would they just get wiped with each and every edit, or would there be a graveyard of past statuses somewhere...?)

	The active/nonactive RP system implementation seems ... interesting, but horribly cumbersome in its described form. (As I've said before, the fewer additional things an user will [i]have[/i] to do, the better; anything more advanced and/or complex should remain opt-in.)