A month or so ago someone gave me the idea of developing a couple different systems that would work together to achieve an automatic member ranking system with automatically assigned moderators. The idea was to create a self moderating/policing forum. The top 1% of the members would automatically be assigned as moderators. Theoretically (if the forum is large enough) the highest ranking individuals would be the most inclined to want to keep the forum civil and orderly (making them ideal moderators). It's the same principle digg and other similar sites are based on. A large mob of people is more likely to behave predictably than a small group of people.
How the member rankings would be determined is somewhat complex and would use various statistics including post counts and Thumbs Ups. Now that my thumbs up mod is pretty much complete I am going to start developing this auto member ranking mod (though I think I will package it with the thumbs up mod).
What I was wondering is if anyone had any thoughts or opinions they'd like to share about this idea. Thanks :)
Post count is a little fickle, some people can easily have very high post counts but bring no actual value to the community (eg if all their posts are in off-topic game threads etc) and would really not make good moderators. Karma might be a better indication but then people give karma for dumb reasons too lol. I havent checked out your thumbs up mod but I will do that now :)
If members find out that this is how to be a moderator then the board might get a rush of posting (which is good) but also false thumbs up from their friends. As I said I need to check out your mod to see what it does still.
All your points are correct. I think that an automated ranking system with automated moderators would not work very well in small communities because it would be too easy for a small group of users to cheat the system.
What might work best is using statistics such as Total Thumbs Ups Received, Average # of Thumbs Ups Received Per Post/Topic, and possibly other stats from mods like the improved reputation mod.
Also, it would probably be best to only auto-assign moderator abilities to users for specific boards and allow admins to assign global mods manually (the old fashioned way) who could help moderate the process. This would mean rankings would have to be determined for every board individually.
The idea of this auto member ranking system is to make moderating a huge community more manageable.