There’s no easy way to come up with answers whether you go ahead on a tech-based or human-based route, though a combination of both approaches seems like it could marry the advantages of both approaches.

There will always be ways to game the system if one tries hard enough. I think if you’ve made it such that the system is easy for newbie MBL users to use, but not that easy to abuse, you’d have succeeded.

The reciprocity of gaining your message quota back is an interesting one, though 20 messages seems more suited to someone who might have a community size of 200-300 members?

I’m looking forward to your MBL post.

There are two other things you’ve mentioned that are worth calling out:

1) You mention that the 20 message limit will hamper communications with your community. I think you may be right on that front, and it may cause us to increase in priority the ability to post a message to all your members. As far as I’m concerned, if you have joined someone’s community, you should be open to whatever they have to say as often as they want to say it. We’ll make it REAL easy to leave the community, of course

2) You mention that some spammers may just create multiple accounts to increase their post quota. I agree that may happen in some cases, but it will likely cut down on the people who simply don’t know better. No solution is perfect, but I’m happy for a 70% one that moves us in the right direction.

I can’t wait to hear more of your thoughts on the human-based moderation. I would love to have something of a craigslist-style moderation system if we can make it work.