I hate that I missed this back when the guy was here, but i’m still going to address his ideas anyways. While the other suggestions are great features, I think your way of thinking has problems.
The biggest problem is that you are still trapped in the Q&A forum mindset. This idea that a community needs badges and points and rankings is completely the wrong approach. This is trying to create an element of competition, and competition divides. It creates a group of have’s and have-not’s.
Our site is not entirely a community site, though. It is also a Q&A site. But the way we do Q&A is not like stack overflow, and that is not how we need to go. We don’t want to have to externally motivate people to perform our mission of fighting ignorance. We want to find the people who are already impassioned about this sort of thing, whether it’s teaching or learning. The only thing we would want that portion of the software to do is to make it easy to ask and answer questions.
As for your other ideas: Why do we need a group of minimoderators to fight SPAM? Why not just let people mark SPAM? Same thing with trolls. If you must give weights to people, then do it behind the scenes, and let the mods have control over it.
And your idea about junk: this is a big thing where you are in the wrong mindset. Posts on a message board are a conversation. They aren’t just answers that you can reorder at will. Conversations need context. The most you can do is some type of subthreading–paying attention to who is talking to whom and keeping things connected. But, honestly, if your conversations are having 2000 posts and people aren’t interested in each one, then that’s the problem you need to address.
Finally, I want to address something that doesnt’ really affect our board, but does others. You seem to think avatars and stuff are all cruft. But personalization is a large part of many communities. There’s a reason why all that stuff developed. People wanted it. Again, get out of the Q&A way of thinking: people in communities aren’t necessarily interested in maximizing the amount of content they can see on screen. Those of us that are already don’t use that stuff.
The thing is, the reason we are in a design rut is that the current system does so many things right. The lessons we’ve learned is that we want pretty much everything we already are using. We probably want more, but we don’t want less.
Finally, one piece of advice for the future: it’s quite clear that this is a form letter that you give to multiple places. There’s nothing really taylored to our message board in your opening. A lot of boards see that as SPAM. Luckily, enough people knew you for that not to be a problem here, but you might not be so lucky elsewhere. You might be better off contacting someone in charge and asking permission. Remember, a forum is a community, and you are on the outside of that community. Tread softly.
(I will commend you on using the term rumspringa, which shows you at least picked up on the intellectual bent of this message board.)
BTW, I personally would not like notifications anytime someone responds to my post. I hate that on Facebook. It should work like a subscription–you can decide which posts actually need replies before you post it. If not, the sheer number of replies would get unwieldy, fast.
