Reputation or Karma System?

Do you use any sort of reputation or karma system on your forum? What are your thoughts of such systems, and do you think they are effective or useful in any way beneficial to the community?

 

If not abused, both reputation and karma systems can be fantastic ways of showing your appreciation and/or grattitude towards other members. I love using em' both.

 

Do you ever experience any abuse of these systems?

 

I have in the past, but I was able to control the situation. I've seen it abused severely, though... and it's not pretty.

 

I will be very happy if vB 4 gives the option to allow only positive rep. No one wants to give up being able to privately give a brief thumbsup without a public post.

But the neg rep ends up being just silly. It doesn't work in terms of encouraging changes of behavior, it's rarely used judiciously. It's too often petty, even spiteful. It leads to tit-for-tatting. And the biggest drawback is that some members try to use it to become de-facto mods. It seems to provoke one of two reactions - usually ignored by the recipient, or when not ignored, it becomes a mod headache.

We've discussed turning off the rep system altogether. But everyone likes the positive reps and that's what's used most of the time. (I probably would not have turned it on, but it was already in long-time use when I took over.)

Rep will not be turned on in the new forum. Bottom line reason - in all honesty I would need more mod staff if it were on. The neg rep is a management headache in terms of member relations. The positive doesn't outweigh the drawbacks. Caveat that if I can turn on positive only, I definitely will.

 

I've only used the reputation system in the past, but even then I don't always enable it.

If it were used more, maybe, but I actually find the quite opposite of abuse when I use it - it is commonly missed or forgotten about, and thus it is another of a handful of powerful features that are rarely used.

 

That's true. It's one of those features that aren't obvious - or in other words, it wasn't implemented in an obvious, "see it immediately" manner.

 

The original owner of my forum popularized the rep system with a lot of reminders and reps. Some longer-time members have built up thousands of (meaningless!) rep points. It's become cultural.

But it's true a lot of newbies don't discover it for quite awhile. They find all this rep in their panel, and they don't know what it is.

Another drawback to the vB rep system is that time and posts give people accumulated rep power that believe-you-me is NOT based on their popularity or the quality of their posts. Two of our biggest problem children, who have had the lead in complaints from other members, have larger rep scores, because of the way it builds based solely on # of posts & length of membership. I would like to re-jigger the rep calc settings so that isn't true any more ... there might be a fuss, though.

I would really, really like to take everyone's rep back to 10 every New Year's Day.

 

It's funny that you mention the meaningless rep. points that are often distributed like pieces of candy. I had one of the highest reputation scores on a forum that I was a member of (Savage, I'm sure you know what forum I'm referring to), but I assure you that it was all well-deserved. Many of the other members with high reputation scores, however, received these points for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

 

Yes, and that was a lot of reputation.

 

Ridiculous amounts of rep. points. I can't even remember the exact amount. I guess you could call that "overuse", not abuse. :p

 

Word to that :yes:

On my old board, some idiot messed with the controls and people ended up having the same rep power as their credits (and credits were in the billions :p) Then they thought it'd be cool if they gave themselves full red bars.

Now I've tried to keep a good leash on rep, my members know the affects of rep abuse very well and are now using it very maturely.

But I agree about the defacto mod thing, sometimes when I go to check some reps, I see some members giving them out as warnings and such repeatedly.

I don't like the "Thank you" system. Quite frankly I think they're incredibly ugly.

 

To be honest I find that the forums I am on either the members don't know about it, or they do but they don't use it. However I do disable negative reputation.

 

Have you (personally) ever seen such a system abused?

 

I personally disable the reputation system. I find that most users are not aware of it or do not know exactly what its purpose is. In the closer knit communities I'm in, I don't think we really need it although I understand why it can be useful for larger forums.

 

Can't say that I have, no.

 

Heh, lucky. It can get ugly and fast - although such situations are usually controllable.

 

I use a combination of the Post Thanks hack and the default reputation system on the Linnie Forum.

Simply put, each time a post is thanked, the post author gets two reputation points. Users cannot directly use the reputation system, so the only way to repute is to "thank" posts. Then, as with default reputation system, the green blocks increase in the postbit as the user accrues more reputation points. So the more thanked posts a person has, the more green bars. It's an easy way to identify users who make many great posts.

 

Yup, all the time.

We used to get like hundreds of threads where "n00bs" would cry about why they got neg repped and how everyone is stupid and blah blah blah. There'd also be "People to Neg" and "Free Pos Rep" threads in the VIP section.