i wouldn't want to put any more work onto Rich than nessesary atm, even with him working fulltime on the website - he is still struggling on his own, and I doubt the website is getting enough revenue to actually warrent hiring a fulltime Mod/Admin for such things.
as for the forum users growing up, I would say we would have to worry about the fact that this is a majoritively Teen forum ... however actually the problem seems to stem more from the older and more experienced users being very petty.
infact the GFXArtist.com way of doing it is pretty cool, because you all vote on who should become a Elite member ... and only the Elite members are allowed to hand out ratings to other members.
i wouldn't be against people voting a new Elite member every month
that would be cool, but for a real system that says that someone is 10points better than another person no doubt down to pure prefferences would suck.
think also members should have atleast 1year in forum before they're allowed to be voted upon, i kinda dislike how newbies can come in act like cock of the walk - no matter how good they are, they're still not seasoned in the eyes of the community because they've not put the time and effort into being here when needed.
perhaps another stipulation could be actually have released something, DLL - Game - Application - Tech Demo - etc... something people can see and use.
