Currently we have members collecting +1's for no apparent reason other than to stroke their egos. I thought it would be nice if we were able to put them to an actual use. To wit, a player could trade in a certain number of +1's for a special in-game action. For example:

10 - You get to read all press between two countries of your choice for that phase
25 - Press between two countries of your choice is blocked for that phase
50 - Press between two countries for one phase goes through you first - you may choose to let a message through or not
100 - Same as above, but now you may edit any message before letting it through
500 - Sabotage a country's orders for one season - all their units hold
1000 - Write another country's orders for that season

This is just a quick list off the top of my head. I would welcome debate on how many +1's a particular power should actually be worth, and would further welcome ideas for other in-game powers. It seems to me that a player should be limited to one use of a particular power per game (or even be limited to one special action in total per game) in order to avoid complete chaos, but that is debatable as well.

The benefits of this plan are numerous. That games would instantly became more interesting and exciting should be obvious. However, this would also radically improve the forum. Folks like me who rarely participate here (this is only my 100th post in a year and a half) would have greater incentive to be active, resulting in a more diverse and robust forum experience. Further, discourse should radically improve as forum users ask themselves "Is this as funny/thoughtful/interesting/intelligent/helpful as it can be?" before posting; and as members will naturally become more discriminating in giving out their own marks of approval, it ensures only the most worthy posts accrue those coveted +1's.

The one drawback I see is that our most +1'ed members would have an unfair advantage in their games for a time, but as they use them up, things should quickly settle into an equilibrium. We could of course wipe out everyone's +1's and start from scratch, but it seems a shame to let all that previous effort into +1 whoring go to waste.

I realize this would be a huge amount of extra work to implement, but I believe the benefits are so great and so obvious that this plan really needs to shoot past reliability ratings and whatever else is on the developers' plates right now and go straight to the top of the to-do list.