Great thoughts, everyone. I wanted to respond to Gahalyn's concerns about the fundamental nature of this place changing. It won't. If the community itself starts going in a bad direction, this token thing is going to disappear in a heartbeat, or at least get a swift corrective overhaul. I certainly won't be distancing myself at all: if anything, playing with tokens is going to re-engage me in building new community activities (which I've not done much of in the past year or so). Regarding ops, they will still have to be responsible, and I'll set up the system so that you have to understand the spirit and nature of the community before you have the ability to become an op.

Still, your "review and approval" idea seems like a sensible check-and-balance against any unforeseen flaw in the system (though I would correct any that arose anyhow), and I wonder if that would work for the RinkAlbum, too.

That segues me nicely into that topic. Kysle's comments were persuasive, and as I was thinking about that, you posted about it too. I was about to say, yeah, you're both right, let's take that off the table. But wouldn't it solve the problem if I had to approve someone being in there in the first place? Then, once approved, you could earn a few tokens by submitting a picture. Better still: you earn a few tokens while it's still a *recent* picture. When it's a year or so old, you stop earning, and that might hopefully nudge some people to submit new pictures whose pictures in there are eight years old. Would that allay your concerns? Still the same approval process, just an incentive to participate once you *are* approved?

On the subject of "ranking" lists: I was not planning on having such a thing. It's a currency, not a ranking. If I had a list of users at all, it might be "list of users who have earned the most in the last month" maybe -- something that, by definition, would not be "sticky" and difficult to break into. (And the RinkChat Line Counts already charts roughly the same thing.) But not an "all-time" list.

Let me close my comments with a general statement: my goal with all this is to create something for us to *do*, not something which will define who we are. I know as well as you do how special this community is, and I would hate to do anything to change that. Admittedly, I've blurred that line by trying to tie the op system to it, and maybe if we try it out, I'll suddenly realize I've made a big mistake. But I think the op system is the one place where I would like to be a *little* less personal -- not much, you understand, but a little -- and I see this token game as a possible opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. I might still chicken out on it, but whether I do or don't, you can trust that all the concerns you've elaborated upon are mine as well.