A shop feature…
 

I have seen this utilized on many forums to great success
Shop Hack
The idea behind it is to reward good posters and punish the bad. Other forumites can rate your posts, either deleting your points, or giving you more. The points can be used for buying various goodies such as adding effects (such as glows or italics) to your username, or posting a sticky (which the mods can unsticky if they want to, of course ;) ).

I wouldn't want that...

I came to this place to give ideas and share my opinions. For something like that I would suggest gogaia.com

With all the attention to graphics, it is a serious hodgepodge of people between the ages of 10 -25. Very difficult to read because threads go up and down faster than a jackhammer. Also with the constant influx of newbies only interested in gold you get more spam than you can deal with.

that's why I would probably have to say "see ya" if that happens here. My dial up connection couldn't take such a sheer drain on bandwidth such as that.

The thing is that you don't get points for spam. I see where you're coming from, though.

And yet we'll still have people spamming, thinking that that'll give them points. Plus I beleve Brian and the other mods are trying to keep everyone equal, no one getting better stuff then anyone else. (Mods excepted of course, due to their administrative abilities.)

Yah, equality rocks! I, however, am still better than all of you.

Serious for a second, though... Flare's right. We'll have a good amount of people who end up spamming, and the mods will have to hurt them, plus it's not worth the work that would have to be done anyway. Best case would be a little cute stuff for old posters who do a good job, worst case is a bunch of dolts spamming cause they think they'll get points.

We already have points though... reputation thingie that people can add/subtract, they just don't do anything.

If you're over six years old and you still need to be rewarded for behaving yourself, some gimmicky forum hack isn't going to help with the kind of problems you've got.

I would like it if that happened, but I also see the downside and would have to vote no. I'm a customizing foo' that would like the ability to add little custom additions to my account just cause I like to tweak stuff, but the minor good of forum vets having their little extra doodads would be outweighed by the massive bad as every noob that wants a shiny glow around his name or what have you would post like a band of maniacs and give the mods a heck of a time corraling them and trying to keep them in line, or banning people left and right in extreme cases. The only other good is it would at least let our reputation points DO something, like krylo said. Sorry, but I'm going to have to say no too.

EDIT: Looked at the list, not many of those are any good anyway, you get most of those already for free here.

Does this type of forum really need something like that?

It should be more of a negative reinforcment thing...

If you're a well-behaved little poster, everyone will treat you nicely.

If you're an annoying little shit, everyone will flame you until your comp combusts from all the ambient heat, killing you and cleansing the genepool.

Advantages: Cathartic, good practice for real life.
Disadvantages: Sucks to be on the receivign end...

Dante, I believe we already do that. Except we don't flame, we gently nudge people towards the right way, until their computer slides one inch to the right from all the nudging, making a deep scratch in the parquet. That'll teach 'em.

As for the shop idea, I don't think this would work out in a forum like this (although the system is way better than "getting points for simply posting"). All my arguments have already been made in previous posts, so I'm not gonna bother.