redeem points for membership

I think it would be a great idea if players are allowed to redeem their points for merchandise and membership. 

What do you guys think?

people would just point hunt.

Still there is nothing wrong with that.

it trashes the forums (more), for one.

I think there will be more trolls.

You think so bean? What if the rules get thightened?

I think it will encourage people to be more active.

Nah, if they tighten the rules anymore, the forums wont be any fun at all.

Value comes from scarcity. A flood of gibberish and pointless troll posts (see here: http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/sholud-we-delete-the-forum-can-you-respond-to-a-double-check-with-a-double-check?page=11 ) will make the place unbearable.

I managed a Forum with over 150K members of which few thousands posted on a regular basis. I used to spend few hours a day cleaning the forum from Spammers and scammers. I did it all by myself with no one else's help.

I think Chess.com has the ressources to take care of the forum and clean it if they want to. Because the more hits the Site receives the better it is for them from with advertisers and so and so.

Well, maybe a week's membership would be all right (on accumulating rather a lot of points).

In fact it might a marketing idea. During their week, someone (or two or three) might discover they like being a member and subsequently take out a subscription.

interesting maybe the idea of membership could better be offered to players who portray poiliteness to opponents and in doing so make chess fun for their opponent too and increase the good name chess.com has amongst online chess players

Didn't you know that you can already do that? Not only can you exhange points for membership, you can also exchange them for titles (although they will cost you a lot of points). And I've heard that sometime in the future chess.com is implementing an upgrade so that you can trade activity points for rating points in bullet, blitz, standard or correspondence.

macer74 was a huge liar. this guy though, who knows.

Those people still received points.

Nah. Better for the points to have a psychological value than a monetary one.

My points never go down.

Look, I got another!!!

There are already too many "cool", "ok", "first", and other similarly inane one-grunt posts to threads by users who get more pleasure from chess.com points than from masturbation. Let's not encourage more of it.

see what people mean, random stupid posts to get points.