Hi, like always, we aren't ignoring this topic - we're making sure that we have a good response to it based on the feedback.

I blocked forum points from forum groups around a year ago, and stand by that decision. What you see is a bunch of user who were using them appropriately (or maybe using them inappropriately and no one saying anything), what I see is accounts being made and then immediately making (or joining) private forum groups and posting thousands of times to get points.

Sometimes these types of "switch flips" (turning off a feature) is to stop the immediate threat and abuse (which it did) and then try to find a way to resolve it going forward so that we can bring it back. In this case, it ended up as a ticket that was never deemed high priority, and floated down the list. What I think is that we need a rethinking of forum points in general, there are now APIs that can determine how "valuable" a post is to a dialog, and I'll look into those which means that forum games, etc, would be out as well.

Forum points are for participating in the forums. We use them as a carrot for getting users to create activity and post on the forums. That hasn't worked out the way I'd envisioned (it became about just playing games and posting over and over). We have many site features that you can do solo, that you can do without paying, that you can pay for, that you can play games for, etc. This is a feature explicitly for getting users involved on the forums, which means that some people are going to be left out. That's why it's not a major requirement to do anything on the site to get forum points.

This is the intention of the feature, and it's how it'll stay. Forum points will be given for participating in the forums, and I'm looking at ways to ensure that we get quality over quantity, and if that becomes the norm then we can increase the probability of forum points going out. I have a few ideas around this (starting discussions from NPCs or staff, or even community members.)

I'm open to any ideas that y'all have for getting these to work in private forums, but at the moment I don't see a good way for that to go forward. We just don't have the ability to moderate all of them, and no one using a private forum to spam and get forum points is going to self-moderate :)