User reputation

[yerkyerk]

A new icon has been added; .

With this, you can give or take reputation from a user. This will indicate wether someone's contributing to the board, or is not contributing anything at all.

This has been implemented in order to give the users more control of the community, as well as to indicate which people are trustworthy and good contributors.
I trust everyone to be mature enough to use this responsibly - don't overvalue reputation and don't abuse this feature against people you don't like - or use it to boost your friends reputation. Needless to say, measures will follow if this is being abused.

If it proves to be detrimental, the user reputation feature will be disabled as quickly as it has been enabled.

[Violos]

Hmm.
I respect your intention, but I don't think this is a good idea.
In fact I can think of very few places on the internet where it is...

It usually fails for the very reasons you mentioned, in spite of control. Probably because those who care to use such features in the first place mostly are the ones who overvalue reputation, for one reason or another.

Don't get me wrong - my experiences in this forum were very positive so far. But one reason for that is exactly that people here seem to care about the game, instead of "making a career" or similar bs I've seen in other places. And I wouldn't like to encourage that.

[yerkyerk]

Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I guess we'll just see where this goes; in case things go awry, it's a simple on and off switch.

[ZaLiTH]

I think this is a pretty good idea actually... Bit of a pity that I had to come searching to find out what it means though. Lol...

The majority of forums I've been to have had similar features, all with different names, but essentially the same thing. I don't think too many people would take chances with this. In the months I've been around this forum, the majority of users seem better behaved than most others I've seen (MXit forum for example), and 95% of the users know that the administrators and moderators don't take crap.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how it does actually turn out..

[Munderbunny]

Heh, what do you mean by abuse? How do we judge if you will agree with our reputation assessment? I mean, if you consider someone not to be contributing much, but I give them rep, do you take it away? Do you penalize me for having given reputation where you don't agree?

[ZaLiTH]

Haha.. Very valid point Munder.. You got my first reputation vote point thingy just for that.

At the end of the day, whether or not a user improves someone else's rep per post or not is entirely up to them. Therefore it is doing it's overall function; which is giving a general idea of how helpful other people think a particular person is. One person giving a negative response just to be difficult won't really make a big dent in the positive responses from 20 other people..

Maybe as a control measure, it could be set that each person can only add to or remove from another user's rep once per message? That is, of course, if it's possible to do that...

[Violos]

The latter should be standard. But a forum like this, where all it takes to register is a 10-minute-mail adress, is highly vulnerable to Sybil attack. Though a group of online friends do just as well.

And as odd as this may seem - people do strange things when their egos take over. The kid I've seen using a sockpuppet to praise his own posts (with the same Avatar and a similar name ) was just a more comedic example.

I guess Yerkyerk is right, we'll just see how it goes.

Though you might think about restricting the right to vote to people with, say, 20 posts or more.

[Munderbunny]

I love how we can treat any subject like a debate about abortion. Go us!

[fathersquid]

Originally Posted by Violos

Though you might think about restricting the right to vote to people with, say, 20 posts or more.

That's actually a pretty good idea. The other day I was searching through the member list, and there are about 250 members that alphabetically fall before my name in the F section... now most of these have never made a post, or haven't been active in years, but a limit in this fashion would certainly cut down on the potential for abuse. Is such a thing possible Yerk?

[yerkyerk]

I think it's pretty clear how this can be abused; and yes, I will judge that if necessary. I'm not expecting to jump in though.

Only members with 50 posts or more can vote. I can increase that, but meh, I think it's quite enough
Also, I think multiple accounts aren't allowed anyway, so, if you want to try... Go ahead, make my day.


EDIT; thinking of it, it's probably not something I'm going to be bothered with. If it's massively abused, I'll disable it. Otherwise, well, it can't really hurt I guess. As long as nobody scolds people in the comments and everyone abides by the normal rules.