@Lee_Ars A penny for your thoughts here.
On one hand I think this a pretty cool feature. It should help promote forum participation and a sense of ownership among the members in the community you created.
On the other hand, it starts treading on some tasks traditionally left to mods at the higher levels. I suppose on a smaller board like CoG with intelligent, stable members (at least I think so 
) it wouldn’t be an issue, but you never know.
I think, with our experiences with George, that very few of us have any level of trust in users.
Discourse’s system of trust seems like it formalizes a hierarchy that already informally exists in most web forums; like you say, @Road_Rash, I think its effectiveness depends on how committed the forum members are to it being effective.
Anytime a community is empowered to police itself, there’s a chance that it’ll encourage homogeneity—the echo chamber effect can be weak or strong, but it’s usually there no matter what. With discourse, folks can flag posts; enough flags will hide a post. Posts that are abusive should be flagged, but posts with unpopular opinions also risk drawing flags from less-than-scrupulous community members. However, I’d rather users be able to hide spam, for example, than have to wait for a mod to come along.
As to treading into moderator territory, I don’t see that particularly as a bad thing. This isn’t gamefaqs.com or the bioware forums or some other kind of place that attracts illiterate shitbags; we don’t need a hard-charging mod squad that’s out to kick ass and take names. Letting users self-police and flag spam frees up the mods time to actually deal with the (very rare) community police action, while letting spam almost take care of itself.
I’m all too familiar with the illiterate shitbags at gaming forums. I was a moderator at a 3500 member gaming board a few years back. Most of the members were great, but there were always troublemakers to deal with. At other gaming boards I’ve also had to try and deal with some mods with a god complex. Also animated avatars and signatures everywhere 
, when all I really wanted to find a good piece of information about a game somewhere in the muck of poorly written posts.
I don’t forsee any problems happening here. You’ve got a good community of members here and at CoG, and we should be able to police ourselves for the most part. It didn’t take me long to figure that one out 
. Thanks for your thoughts.
Hopefully I make it to regular user soon. 
I was telling my roommate the other day that if we had someone show up on CoG who was illiterate or wrote in textspeech, they’d get heckled off of the board. I like hanging out with intelligent, literate people.
That’s right, I got here all on my own! Fukers.
My signature I use at most boards I belong to is a line of text that explains how I feel about idiots:
“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
I prefer “It is better to remain silent than to attract the attention of the guy with a club.”
If you think the members of gaming forums are bad, you should see the ones over on various car forums. They make Neanderthals look like rocket scientists.
I’m also familiar with the types of members on various car forums as well. If you can wade through the muck you can find some very good information on your vehicle on those boards.
Then again, I guess you can find scum and villainy on any type of board.
Sounds like I’ve got some work to do regarding the kind of content I post.
So are we a wretched hive of scum and villainy, then?
Yeah, I know - rhetorical question…
Well, not everyone. 
Anyway, somebody needs to take away my geek card since I forgot wretched hive in my post above.
Yes, yes we are… well, maybe not all off you. Maybe it is just me.
No, we’re a wretched hive of cynicism and hatred.
Do gnat’s even come in hives? I think we are more of a swarm of…meh.
What? I’m sweetness and light. I don’t know about you guys. 
Ahhh the evil burning god is here!
wiggles fast underground
/me runs away from Sunbeam so the lightening doesn’t hit me…
Wait, I’m trusted more?
hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe.
With great volume comes great responsibility. So what can I break and where can I see it?