The Moderation staff is discussing the usefulness and implementation of the Reputation system, and would like the members feedback relating to it.

As a result of many users' rep fluctuating, the Staff has been discussing the possibility of it being changed or taken down, altogether. The poll won't give us a %100 definite answer on what we're going to do, but it will give us an idea. Please post your feedback, along with voting in the poll.

What I would like is more of a feedback system, so that when giving -rep the one who does so has to supply a reason for it, such as incorrect grammar, spam or other good reasons, and this would also be shown to the user, maybe via the PM inbox. I know it's complicated to implement but I think that would be better.

Or just take it down completely if everything fails.

+/- then feedback options appear why + or why -
press +.... options appear #helped me with problem, #gave info to what i was looking for, ....
press -.... options appear #bad language, #user spamming, #posting illegal content, ....

this way mod's can view community input to see who to watch.
votes from users count as 1x
votes from Mod's, admin's count as 4x or 5x

I agree with the 2 above. It would be nice to know why you have -rep, rather then just knowing you have -rep(it is a little pointless if you don't know why).

Take it down, completely.

I said to change it... Change it so I always have either the lowest or highest rep on this forum.

Best thing to do is really have a per-post rating system that gives a couple icon options like Agree, Disagree, "WTF?", Funny, Helpful, Informative, Dumb, On Drugs, Boring, Interesting, etc... Then have a short group of 4-6 icons where the rep system is now that shows the 4-6 icons that have been most voted for from all your posts, and the number of times it has been voted for. Also have a full list of all the icons, and how many times they have been voted for on the user profile page.

Either that or take it down completely.

I think it should be kept, but changed slightly to allow staff to moderate it and deal with abuse.

It would be nice to see in my profile what I was getting reputation for, and from whom. Or to know what I was losing reputation for (and thus what to do right).

An alternative would be to have a reputation system similar to the Steam forums, where you cannot take reputation from people, but you can give it to them for good posts.

Finally, I think you should not be able to give reputation to different users more than once every five minutes, and not to the same user again within an hour of repping them previously.

If you want my opinion, I really don't care if I have -16 or +33, you may take it down really

keep it,

fight against the abuse with the feedback system.

If there will be a feedback system I think it should be integrated into the profile as a separate dialog that looks much like a page in a thread, except there are no signatures or avatars, just feedback and some info about the one who leaves it. Putting a 'Report abuse' button by each feedback could help a lot to fight abuse.

These changes would need a lot of extra programming though. Feedback/visitor messages are not a standard feature like in vBulletin for example.

Obviously. It's going to take more skills than I have at least.

That actually sounds like a better idea.

I hate the reputation system. It implies that a user's credibility and usefulness to the forum is defined by a majority vote. Being right is not a democracy or a popularity contest.

People will look at me and say "Oh, he has a low popularity; he must be a troll and doesn't contribute to threads!", when this is not true.

Michael Archer, don't complain. Raicuparta had -83 once, really!

Michael is also right in the sense that this system is unreliable. BTGbullseye's rep was reset to 0 for god knows what reason, after having reached the -50s.

Michael, smarter people won't.

I know you are not a troll but lots of people disagree on your "poor" definition of capitalism and on some posts you posted in the Evolution topic.

Which I personally also agreed on with others that your definition is actually pretty poor but I will take your arguments and others based on value not reputation, no worries.

Idiots, of course, will use the reputation system as a means of proving something when they can't otherwise, but then we will know who here is one.

It's not more important than you make it yourself.

I'd rather see it gone completely. There are so many different reasons one would increase/decrease someones reputation that it becomes completely meaningless. Seeing someone with a very low reputation only tells me that people disagree with that person a lot, which as has been pointed out doesn't say anything about the quality or validity of that persons posts.

Personally, I think that rep shouldn't be completely based on someone else's decision to hit a + or - sign. I think rep should be sort of a post count. There was one forum that used a similar system where rep was post count and your rep only went down if you used poor grammar or got yourself banned.

I honestly think it should be removed completely or dramatically changed. I may be accustomed to other forums, but there's little point in giving your opinion and then being flamed or -repped for it because it differs from the majority. +Rep isn't as major, but I wouldn't mind if it was removed.