Karma system

General Discussions
#1

I’ve been to several boards where karma feature became a problem.
People rated others low, because of that those people with low karma thought it created the image of them being trolls.

This lead to quite a few arguments. The karma system is easily abused.
What I believe should occur is:

  1. Mods can only set a persons karma (up/down based on a posters behaviour).
  2. Remove it altogether.

Choice 1 can be used to tell a member to behave(like a warning system).
Choice 2 would just prevent all the problems associated with the karma sysytem.

#2

Choice 3 would of course be to let it run on this board (which is notoriously friendly), and if it becomes a problem envetually, remove it then. :slight_smile:

Kev

#3

In systems where people can do big karma mods, or where someone’s getting all their friends to rank them, then it’s OK so long as there’s some way for mods to issue corrective karma then it should be fine AFAICS - that would let mods fix occasional abuses. Personally I’d not want to do anything like that without talking to the other mods for second opinions, and I expect that’s what would happen generally, since most of the regular posters around here know each other fairly well.

But if this one is only ever +/- 1 then it’s going to be pretty tough to abuse?

EDIT: actually, seeing as SMF haven’t documented karma anywhere that google finds easily, haven’t covered it in the help link for this board, and the whole thing’s very non-specific and vague, personally I’d mildly prefer to be rid of it. Shrug. I’m sure it will do good things here, but … I’m just not a fan of rep ssytems unless they’re clearly spelled out :slight_smile:

#4

Tbh, isn’t it just going to be like post count, no-one really cares anyway? (at least I assume they don’t?)

Kev

#5

Yes and no. Whilst many of us couldn’t care less about post count, mainly because we already know most of the other posters by reputation, and know (just by the topic!) when they’re being clever and when they don’t know what they’re talking about ::), newer users of the board have no idea and use the vast differences in post count as a guide.

Ditto I’m sure people will use karma counts as a guideline on how to interpret the replies they get from particular people, and also to prejudice them against people as being “nice” or “nasty” - but then people might have been rated high or low for things nothing to do with nice/nasty. Which is why I (slightly) prefer not to have such systems if they’re not clear.

OTOH…we’ve propsed using post-counts as a way of picking forum mods before (!), and a post-counts + karma filter would be a lot better, IMO, if we ever did something like that :slight_smile:

#6

Hmm. Look at that - someone’s already given me -1 for no apparent reason.

It’s a well-known required feature of a reputation system that if you mark people negatively you MUST give a reason that gets PM’d to them. Otherwise…what’s the point? Whatever gained me that -1 mark I’ll do it all over again because I have no idea what it was.

(I’m coming at this from the MMOG angle, where rep systems have been a hot topic for years, and there’s a lot of common knowledge about them; YMMV, but I’m sure most if not all of the observations apply to pure forum commmunities as much as to MMOG communities)

#7

Either remove the karma, or hide the values so you can only see your own karma.
Popularity contests suck.

(Mostly because I never win. ;D)

#8

Karma stuff often doesn’t work, but sometimes it does.

Well, I also think we should try it for a while and see what happens. I would say that it could turn out ok, because we (usually) don’t have any political or religious discussions here. If it’s only used to award good/helpful posts or for modding spammers down, it should be ok. Well, “should”… let’s see what will happen. :slight_smile:

#9

It would be nice if when you click boo/applaud on someone a place to add a small one line comment appeared so the person could see why he/she was marked the way they were.

#10

[quote]Either remove the karma, or hide the values so you can only see your own karma.
[/quote]
hiding the karma from others defeats the purpose of it. It supposed to inform other people about the validity of your posts. Which I’m sure we all agree doesn’t really work. A rating system for the comment itself might be good. So if I for instance say: “Never check for null”, that comment can be rated lower (and eventually hidden?). Similar to Slashdot.

#11

I should note that all Karma transactions are logged, so we can see who is abusing the system. The goal of a Karma system is to help people think before they post because other can judge them based on their contributions. If I see that there is massive abuse of the system, I will change it. But for now, let’s see where it goes…

-Chris

Oh, I should also mention that only those with over 350 posts can modify Karma.

#12

[quote]The goal of a Karma system is to help people think before they post because other can judge them based on their contributions.
[/quote]
I’d feel much more comfortable giving posts +1/-1 than the person themselves.

#13

Oh man :slight_smile: I think it sounds pretty neat but I dont see that its ‘needed’. I vote to let it roll and see how it goes, it adds another little element to the forums. If it keeps things interesting that is good! Sounds like I need to start post whoring more so I can give some karma out, 350 is harsh!

#14

Those abusing the system will have their karma set lower?

#15

LOL - now I’ve had 3? 4? more negatives, and no idea why. What a load of crap. I looked around some SMF forums recently (evaluating which forum s/w to use on a work website), and those with SMF’s karma extension seemed to be completely haywire with the karma settings - people jumping up and down 50 in the space of days for no apparent reason, huge amounts of flagrant yet anoymous until the admins have time to peruse the logs abuse.

Also, I must note that the SMF docs implied the karma logs are automatically deleted periodically, which would suggest the whole logging thing could be moot.

IMHO, I’d say this was because the SMF karma extension is just pants, a “cool feature” they added to the s/w without thining about it; as noted above, rest of world + dog learnt many years ago that explicit reasons for ratings are a necessary component. What would you think of ebay if all ratings were anonymous ?!?

#16

I agree Blah, if people want to rate others they should also give a reason with a minimum word count of at least 30 (So you don’t get a 1 phrase wonder like “You’re an idiot.”).

I bet any money that it was a silly person rating me down because I made this thread.

#17

You’ve managed -4 in, what, just one day since the board went live? And you can only guess why…

Q.E.D.

#18

If you know why then by all means tell me.

#19

boo! ;D

If nothing else, we should at LEAST know what post was rated. These rating could very well be from postings from a long time ago.

#20

Incidentally, GameDev.net has a rating system that works kinda similar (and is also the topic of much debate). The quality of posting definatly seems to have improved somewhat since it was introduced. However I don’t think it’d make much difference here.

Funnily enough though, all of the same suggestions have been brought up and shouted down for various reasons.