Would you have us make the assumption that important, well written and intelligent posts are distributed equally by numbers regardless of forum? CureZone goes Socialist?
That, to me, would be like saying that if you assigned the entire student body of a high school to do a research paper, you would expect to have the number of top grades to be spread equally among honor and merit scholars, special ed students, wood shop, advanced studies, home economics, chess club, vocational classes, science club, ag students and members of the junior Mensa chapter.
I am not downgrading any forum on CureZone - by and large, CureZone attracts a great number of intelligent, well informed and talented readers - but I am upgrading the Iodine forum. I think the Iodine forum has more than it's share of the top students and less of the marginal ones. It is also a very robust forum. One should expect it to have more than it's share of awards handed out.
It may well have more awards than it should have - but it is nevertheless one of the brightest spots at CureZone and I think it is a disservice to castigate the forum or its moderators for supporting a robust membership with great participation and well thought out posts.
I agree that R, RN and BSA should mean something. I also think that if you are so stingy that only an elite few are able to earn recognition then you will see less participation, less thoughtful posts and a slide in the rankings for CureZone, and as a result fewer people will be educated instead of medicated because of some silliness and pettiness over rankings.
Maybe a better solution would be to keep a simple ranking system but allow multiple "good message" votes or enable members to rank each message 1-10 and record those votes or scores instead of just the "agree" and "disagree" votes. That way, CureZone members would be awarded by their fellow members and not solely by moderators who were too lax, too stingy or had some private ax to grind.