Not that it matters with the current lotto system (rarely win if ever), but wouldn't the mods with post-deleting ability _really_ be able to single people out? ..and ruin their forum experience, for what that's worth, but I am betting that the lotto system will be changed to make wins more likely, or redescribed if that's already what's going on.

Different people are sensitive to different things, and especially seeing as how some mods take things personally, the entire forum could degrade into "praise only," lest your chance at vets be taken away.

To show a glaring example, papajohns takes things personally, and deletes posts against him. Evidence that he takes things personally? He bans IP's from reading his site, whether or not those people actually visit his site more than once a year. He takes the trouble of getting IP's from NF forums, then bans them from his own site.

Another example was the cancer thread from the old forums. I posted to carefully research which charities you donate to, because many charities have extremely high overhead, and that eats into your donations. Someone didn't like that post, and deleted it. I suggested donating to a specific university's research groups. I'm sure it didn't fit the mood of everyone else's replies a la "i'm sorry, my relative is going through the same thing too," but I'll go out on a limb here and say that deleting that post was retarded. It's a smart thing to do to research your charities, not throw money blindly and hope it's working. It'll do more for cancer that way.

Anyway, it's easy to see that some mods can go on personal vendettas and declare most of a player's posts useless and delete them. My solution? The actual main point:

Rewarding players for well-created guides is a good thing, however, the current lottery system is more or less rewarding a high post count, regardless of helpfulness. 20,000 repeated replies will not help more than one good guide, and that good guide should get many times more rewards than idle posts. As well, the current system is open to abuse by both spammy players and less-than-happy mods. It's a slippery slope that is just best avoided entirely.

My suggestion is to scrap the lottery and reward guide-makers directly. Instead of having mods look for and delete useless posts, have them evaluate and accept/reject guides, then reward the author. As this is both a suggestion and discussion, I'll post in suggestions as well, recommend it up if you like it.