[ANNOUNCEMENT] User Reputation

[majikal]

I've seen systems like these degenerate pretty badly, but hopefully with the limitations you're putting in place this won't be such a futile attempt. It really comes down to the maturity level of the people with the power to vote, and I'd like to think that most of us wouldn't decrease someone's rep just out of spite, but you never know with Magic players.

[Bardo]

It really comes down to the maturity level of the people with the power to vote, and I'd like to think that most of us wouldn't decrease someone's rep just out of spite...

Right! We're being optimistic on this point. :)

[Pastorofmuppets]

does this mean that we'll no longer have custom user titles?

[KillemallCFH]

does this mean that we'll no longer have custom user titles?

The "Is here to learn," "is worth listening to," etc. titles can be seen by hovering your mouse over the user's reputation meter (in most of our cases, the little green square under our post count); I can only assume our custom user titles aren't going anywhere.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

It seems mastubatory and incestuous to suggest that only those who are worth listening to can decide what's worth listening to.

I'm for the experiment, but voting should be open to all members. Or all members that have a certain post count (say 50+) to counter gimmick accounts.

[The Wes]

I’d have to agree, it seems like the voting should be up to everyone over a certain post count (50 seems to work). If you want to go democratic, why limit who can vote? Only allowing the adepts to post seems a little elitist.

[Illissius]

elitist

Oh great, now you've done it.

[Aggro_zombies]

If you open voting to everybody, you'll end up with the scenario I described, where people will get reputation for "EPIC LULZ LOL XD!!!!1!!!ONE" in addition to serious Legacy discussion. Eventually what you'll end up with is a dual rating system that shows either how popular or how thoughtful you are.

Of course, something like that exists now. Even looking at the current Adepts, we've got Pinder on one end and people like 4eak on the other.

[Anusien]

Have you read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? See for example here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie. It details this concept pretty well.

My suggestions:
A) Allow anyone to give reputation, but weight the reputation they give by their own reputation. Also, scale the reputation they give by how often they vote. Maybe this is too complicated, but it's sort of the way PGP key signing works. In other words, a person's reputation is the sum of the up/down votes they've gotten, scaled:
Reputation_Change_From_User = Modification (+/-) * User_Reputation/Max_Reputation / Number_Of_Reputation_Changes_They've_Made_Locally.
That's a complicated formula to do and maybe it's too much overhead. Something to consider though.

B) Allow anyone to see the number. There's a better sense of how you're doing that way. Everyone just cares about the number anyway, and it helps separate people who are on the cusp. I get the boxes idea, but people will probably just compare box numbers. So just show the #. EDIT: You can find your own reputation by clicking the button at the bottom of your post near the Alert to Mods button.

Also, I strongly recommend reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. And it's Creative Commons Licensed, aka free.

For that matter, why is voting people up for "teh epic lulz!!!111" bad? I feel like it will happen anyway. More importantly, I think you should open voting to everyone because honestly, we all already sort of know each other. It's the members who haven't made a name for themselves who matter more. Take someone who spent a lot of effort in a thread to help teach newbies how a deck works, why not reward them for that effort by letting the people who they helped uprate them. Not every Adept sees every thread.

Also, if you want to try and end the elitism, you could strip the names off posts and copy them off somewhere to be voted on anonymously. I'm not sure if there's a way to automate this.

[Volt]

This whole thing is pretty trivial. However, if you're going to do it, then I agree that the ability to vote should be limited to a relatively select few, i.e. the Adepts and Moderators, even though the current group of Adepts was imperfectly selected. It will probably still be somewhat of a popularity contest, but not as bad as if you opened it up to everybody.

[Anusien]

This whole thing is pretty trivial. However, if you're going to do it, then I agree that the ability to vote should be limited to a relatively select few, i.e. the Adepts and Moderators, even though the current group of Adepts was imperfectly selected. It will probably still be somewhat of a popularity contest, but not as bad as if you opened it up to everybody.

I'm not picking on any current Adepts. But in theory, why do we expect people who were picked in a flawed fashion to be able to product useful results? Does Garbage In, Garbage Out not apply?

[Volt]

I'm not picking on any current Adepts. But in theory, why do we expect people who were picked in a flawed fashion to be able to product useful results? Does Garbage In, Garbage Out not apply?

Yes, GIGO applies. I guess what it comes down to is I trust that a larger percentage of the Adepts will be judicious about repping people, compared to the general public. Then again, maybe I'm being naive.

[Tacosnape]

Yes, GIGO applies. I guess what it comes down to is I trust that a larger percentage of the Adepts will be judicious about repping people, compared to the general public.

This. Some of the Adepts may be less than perfect, but letting absolutely anyone vote is a terrible idea. Trust me, I live in the United States.

[spirit of the wretch]

You can vote for others only at the highest level.

So maybe I got this all wrong but apparently I'm not in that group (which is a shame, but that's not the point), yet I seem to be able to vote for people. At least I have that funny little balance at every post. Might be because I have moderation rights in our team forum.
Chances are, you don't want a random guy to also have these powers, so I figured you should know.
Otherwise: Great idea.

[Raptor]

I have seen the green bar this morning and I thought I was just blind and that I have just never noticed that they existed.

I like the idea of this system, which could probally higher up the quality of some posts. I'm pretty fine with it as long as no one abuse it by powering their friends and such things.


P.s. I thought for a minute that "nightmare staff" was for the banhammer and how many users you've banned.

[Phoenix Ignition]

Hah Chinese Farmers are going to make a killing on this forum.

I'm not sure I like this. I can see someone getting voted down or just not voted "up" as much (not contributing as frequently as others, but making awesome posts like 4eak always does) being disregarded unnecessarily. Like, "He's just a 'Here to learn and help others learn' so he doesn't know as much as me!" happening.

Overal apathetic though.

[Ciberon]

Quote time.

To give you some idea of the purpose of this, we'll need to examine the structure of the membership of this site. As is obvious to even the newest site member, there are varying colors which represent different "levels" of membership - Member (blue), Adept (teal), Moderator (maroon), and Admin (red). There are others as well, but those are the exception, rather than the rule. The main group we'll focus on is the Adept group.

At first I need to ask. How good has it been for you to have an Adept group? Do you feel like having some people "labelled" Adept overall helps the forum?
The thing is that I don't know if all people were just members (aside from staff) the adepts wouldn't still have the impact they do.

This has been a source of great dilemma for the site staff. On one hand, we love having a group of dedicated members with whom to discuss the workings of the site and gain input from a much smaller sample size than the entire site. On the other hand, maintaining such a group becomes difficult as people move in and out of interest in the format/game. It is, in no uncertain terms, a drama fest for us to effectively maintain a "club" where we recognize and reward those members who are supposed to have some skill at the format. Realistically, we're no better judges of this than you are - which is why the system is imperfect.

From what I figured out by just reading the thread here, the new system doesn't fix the "people come and go" problem because reputation wouldn't change unless you post. An Adept by the new system would still be an adept now matter how much time he or she refrains from posting.

Sorry for the imperfect english. I hope it was understandable.

[dahcmai]

Interesting idea, sounds like it's worth a shot. At the worst, you only have to disable it and go back to the adept system or come up with something else.

Maybe people will think before they post grammatical horrors now. Less flaming and drama might be a nice bonus.

[Illissius]

stuff

I think the limitation here is things vbulletin lets you do without mucking around in the code.

[Digital Devil]

Pretty good idea. The only problem I see with this method is that if those who have the decision power to vote (or down-vote) simply aren't interested into reading a given thread, they're not rising the thoughtful poster's points, even if he/she made an insightful post about a specific situation/case. For example, if a player creates a powerful and innovative deck in the N&D forum, but no one except for "is here to learn/help others learn" people is interested in the thread, the poster isn't receiving the feedback it should have. Of course granting the right to vote to all members is insane, but at least there should be some way to decide ab ovo who is worthy of our attention, and of course of higher rank people's (adept's/admin's/moderator's) attention.