Some Real-Talk: Hawkspace After Dark Problems

I think the key thing is, any punishments (outside of Actual Serious Problems, which are a kettle of fish we've been fortunate to avoid so far) have to be straight-up voluntary.

If I break a rule that exists just for the heck of it, I shouldn't have to deal with it at all if I don't want to. Yeah, maybe I'm being a poor sport, but maybe I'm just having a bad day and even doing the mildest of things to address whatever frivolous rule I broke is more than I'm willing to deal with.

That sounds grumpy, so let me be a bit more specific on the sort of thing I'm thinking of.

Say we had a list of things you can do after violating a rule. This might be "go around with this custom title", "change your avatar for a week", "start a thread about this", "post an apology haiku", whatever. And each item on the list has a point value. Do a more demanding task and you get more, let's call them "Redemption Points". Collect enough and, I don't know, you can get silly meaningless prizes?

But one of the tasks is "nothing at all", and it's an option but you don't get any points for it.

This way the rulebreaking is more of a game, one that you can opt out of at any time. (Ideally there would also be rewards for rule-following, so it's an actual strategic decision. I don't have mechanical thoughts on that, though.) This, I think, is the issue. As it stands right now, you can't really opt-out of the "game" aspect without opting-out of the forum, but I don't see that as a necessary condition to running a subforum-wide game. And I think letting people choose to just ignore the game if they want, but play along any time they feel like it, will make the game side of the forum into more of a fun extra and less of a burden.

This is just Talk rather than A Formal Rule Proposal because i don't feel up to assembling it into the latter. Just tossing it out there as a general idea.