Reputation?
 

How is the reputation supposed to work on this forum?

It seems every time I add or subtract to a member's reputation that I cannot ever add to their reputation again. It tells me I need to spread around reputation before I can add to their reputation. I have added to several people's "reputation", yet I still cannot add to people that I added to when the new forum first went on. It seems soon I won't be able to add to anyone's reputation as I will have modded everone's rep once.

Does something need to be tweaked?

Re: Reputation?
 

I never even noticed this reputation stuff.

Where does one see someone's score?

Did I win?

-Crat

Re: Reputation?
 

Click the "User CP" link to see how many points you have. Hover over the little green square to get a very rough idea what someone else's is.

Re: Reputation?
 

Hmm. Interesting. That works on windows for me, but not unix.
Seems like maybe it shouldn't be such an obscure feature anyway.

Thanks for the info.

-Crat

Re: Reputation?
 

Hm, I see nothing about Reputation in User CP. Normally it's there. (I know all about the rep system :P )

Re: Reputation?
 

Shows up in the main panel of the User CP if you've received any rep at all, along with comments.

Re: Reputation?
 

Wow! Cool feature. I never would have noticed it if you guys hadn't brought it up.

Still, it took me a while to figure out how to add to people's rep. If any of you guys are wondering (or as slow as me), there are three little blocks at the bottom, left-hand side of each person's post. The middle one is how you add or subtract rep!

Coolsauce.

Re: Reputation?
 

You have to add reputation to another person, before you can add reputation to the person you just 'repped' this is to stop people continualy repping each other. Thus, gaming the system and making it lose its value.

The idea is you "rep" people for good behaviour and quailty posts and that reputation shows a persons standing within the community and as such you can give negative reputation for a person responding poorly.

Now to test it out, "rep" me for my usual and insightfull post!

Re: Reputation?
 

Rep added, now make sure you can see it in your User CP.

I actually had a note to post an announcement on rep and how it works, seems it found its way out there already.

Oh, while we're in a testing mode, let's make sure that adding rep to admins works ok :)

Re: Reputation?
 

Repped you,

But, Rep comments don't appear to show who gave the reputaiton. I think it'd be worthwhile to know who gave you the rep!

Re: Reputation?
 

I believe that's intended, in case someone wants to stay anonymous. I sign all my reps with my name.

Re: Reputation?
 

Repped you once, I've repped several people once. I have not been able to rep anyone twice. If we can only have one rep for someone, I think it would be better to have it a scale of -5 to 5 and we should be able to change the rep we have for a poster. As it stands now, there are people that have a positive rep from me forever and that will never change no matter what they post. Worse, there are a couple that have a "bad rep" from me that will never be able to "redeem" themselves. Had I known it works this way I probably would have hardly used it at all because I wanted to save it for a really good/bad post.

Re: Reputation?
 

Hadn't really changed reputation settings from the defaults. Just went in to look at some of the options and made a couple of changes.

The default setting for "number of people you must rep before you can rep the same person" was 20, reduced it to 3.

The regular user group can now see who is giving them reputation and associated comments.

As a general guide, you don't have to agree with someone's point of view to give them +rep - is the post constructive,informative,thought provoking,well meaning, etc and overall adds something to the discussion? The idea behind rep is that the community is somewhat self-moderating via the reputation system.

Also, the more rep you have, the more it counts when you give rep to someone else.

Re: Reputation?
 

Thanks you! That seems a lot better.

Re: Reputation?
 

Right here, this kills the whole system. Who wants to give someone bad rep for a troll when they will just get hit with negative rep right back. And if I give someone positive rep, I want it anonymous as well. I don't want someone thinking I was sucking up or some such silliness.

Frankly, I think forum rep systems in general are a bad idea. It just encourages very petty people with a freakish amount of free time to make dummy accounts and use the system as a whole new way to be a miscreant.

Re: Reputation?
 

I agree with all of this but does it matter? Unless reputation has some function it's just a number that means as little as post count does. (And given how trivial it is to game the system I would certainly argue against making it meaningful in any way at all....same with post count!)

--matt

Re: Reputation?
 

I'm in total agreement with Matt. Damn, Dick Cheney's office must be freezing over right now. ;)