I think the "thumbs down vote" is never going to work and IMO all it brings to the table is negativity and people second guessing there posts and ultimately their trades.
Ive never seen it work on any forum, and I doubt that I will. All ive seen it do is open an unessecary can of worms.
Also it may be hard to persuade the mods to take a away the green sheilds as it is a reward of sorts for people posting here, which is HC's ultimate goal. I beleive people do post more because of them, which is what they are designed for.
So the problem here IMO is not the shields, but the few who do or dont have a sheild, that post short, meaningless posts. So from what I can see, the problem should be directed at the length of posts with a minumum word amount per post. If you can say it less than 20 words or whatever, its probably not of much use to anybody.
