Should the site have "give reputation to players"?

Sharples

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Many forums seem to have these, such as Steams. If you like a persons post, you can give them reputation. Every time a person gets reputation, they get something like 5 reputation points. And it keeps stacking. You can't give reputation to the player twice until you've spreaded some reputation to other players.

What do you guys/girls think?
 
I don't really see a need for it. I'm on another forum with such a system, and the only use for it I've seen is a way of saying "thanks"... but you can do that via replying to a thread or PM as well. So the only case where it's really superior is if a thread is old and you want to say thanks, but don't want to necro... and PM'ing is still an option for that even without a rep system.

The reputation points is kind of pointless. Once you're at a forum for long enough, you figure out who the movers and the shakers are anyway, but it's less like a popularity contest without "reputation" being displayed. So, having been here awhile, I know for the most part who the great mod makers for Civ3 are (and some of them for Civ4), who the top-level players are, who's known for their stories, who the moderators are, etc. As well as who tends to be able to offer good advice in certain areas, such as unit making or historical accuracy. The only thing a reputation number would give is an indication that someone is known for something, but with no indication of what.
 
Although it probably exceeds what you have in mind, on another games forum I frequent, there used to be a rep system, but it was positive and negative. And then one still unknown jerk spent a great deal of time painstakingly, post-by-post give many notable members, including myself, huge negative reputations seemingly just out of spite and malice. A thread popped up to address the issue, and the mod deactivated the whole system and reset everyone's visible rep.
 
^Reminds me of a forum I don't belong to anymore. Cliques of people would target others with whom they had ongoing arguments or plain didn't like. This sometimes had a real effect on the person's forum experience since some special hidden forums were only accessible if your rep score was high enough.

One of the admins decided to abuse his position and gave a member he particularly hated a whopping MINUS 12,000 rep points. This was obviously a case of abuse of the system, a lot of members protested, and once the other admins figured out what had happened, the offending admin was stripped of his position.

There is already a thread in OT where noteworthy posts can be acknowledged. A reputation system is just asking for trouble.
 
Absolutely not! It just smells of elitism.
 
vBulletin has an inbuilt reputation system, but staff have never liked the idea of it, because of the elitism involved. However, I'd guess that staff would be more open to the idea of a 'like post' feature, which acknowledges individual good posts but doesn't give a user a number to show off.
 
:confused:

That doesn't make sense, unless the number of "likes" is visible only to the individual who receives them.
 
Sorry, I meant 'a number to show off independent of an individual post'. Recognition for an individual post is different to carrying around a 'reputation'.
 
So you would prefer a system where a note that "X number of people liked this post" appears rather than a running total be kept and made visible of all the likes the member has ever had?


An example I'm thinking of is the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) comment boards where I occasionally post. Each post I make has the number of "likes" publicly shown that I receive for that one post, but if anyone wants to know the total number of likes I've ever had since joining the site, they have to look up my profile since that information isn't readily visible to everyone. Is this the sort of thing you're thinking of, only the total number of likes for everything would be known only to the poster him/herself?
 
An example I'm thinking of is the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) comment boards where I occasionally post. Each post I make has the number of "likes" publicly shown that I receive for that one post, but if anyone wants to know the total number of likes I've ever had since joining the site, they have to look up my profile since that information isn't readily visible to everyone.

I think a similar analogy would be the karma system on Reddit, although I don't know if the mods would allow downvotes as well.
 
I think a similar analogy would be the karma system on Reddit, although I don't know if the mods would allow downvotes as well.
I'm not familiar with Reddit, although CBC used to allow downvotes. They changed the system because of targeted downvoting. In a previous discussion here about rep systems and likes, the major concern about downvoting was exactly that - targeted downvoting based on dislike of the poster, not the merits (or non-merits) of the post itself.
 
downvotes are not going to happen (Valka D'Ur already summarized why) - also we have one aspect around here where this is actually sort of possible, namely the downloads database with its rating and we have sufficient troubles there with people getting offended by unexplained F ratings and trolls using the system to annoy individual users - in a site wide reputation system this would most certainly get exploited quickly. A purely positive voting system on the other hand is much more difficult to game for trolling purposes (though not impossible) - so that I think that this is something that actually could have a chance of being implemented. Not sure if its a feature available in the currently used vBulletin version though.
 
So you would prefer a system where a note that "X number of people liked this post" appears rather than a running total be kept and made visible of all the likes the member has ever had?


An example I'm thinking of is the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) comment boards where I occasionally post. Each post I make has the number of "likes" publicly shown that I receive for that one post, but if anyone wants to know the total number of likes I've ever had since joining the site, they have to look up my profile since that information isn't readily visible to everyone. Is this the sort of thing you're thinking of, only the total number of likes for everything would be known only to the poster him/herself?

Yeah, something like that, though I'm not sure how visible the total number of 'likes' received by an individual should be.

When this idea has come up in the past, the major problem facing it is a technical one. I imagine that problem still exists.
 
A trip to the vBulletin support forum and perusal of the manual should help.
 
As far as I remember, any such system would be in the form of an add-on, which, though not impossible, involves certain difficulties which may not make it worth the effort. The admins have indicated in the past that the implementation of a system such as this would be more than a mere triviality.
 
I looked up the vBulletin manual (google it; it's freely available online for everyone to read). There's a whole section in it about enabling, setting up, and using the reputation system. There's a place on the support forum where moderators and admins can get their questions answered.

Enabling the system itself isn't that hard. Tweaking it to how you want it would mean studying the manual and asking questions of forum owners, admins, and mods who have already had experience with it. I don't know if it's possible to enable only the positive rep, but as I recall from that site I belonged to years ago, you can set things so individuals can't leave rep scores (a measure intended to curb those who have abused the system).
 
Reputation is off as being elitist.

A like system isn't of any benefit. We already have a thread rating system that is used (on some subfora) or isn't (on some subfora). I don't see any value in liking individual postings in addition to the rating systems.
 
@Valka - as said above, as far as I understand we're not interested in using the reputation system. What we'd be interested in would involve either a heavy amount of customisation, or a different add-on.
 
Or a different version of vBulletin. A quick perusal of the support forum yesterday tells me that the later versions of vBulletin actually do have a "like" system instead of a rep system.

Personally I don't care about this as much as you seem to think I do. I'm offering information, suggestions, and the insights gained from having experienced what can happen when even one person decides to abuse the rep system.

A fully-functional rep score system would be a social disaster waiting to happen, but something lesser might be interesting to try. It depends on if you're willing to try something new, ignore any requests for this feature, or put up with spammy "+1" posts.
 
Yep, vB5 includes a like feature. I would contend that a decision as to whether to upgrade would involve considerations beyond willingness to try a new feature, ignoring requests for the feature, or putting up with spammy posts.

I don't believe I've said anything which indicates I think you care all that much about this.
 
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