Tired of waiting: KARMA hack finished

Tired of waiting for 2.0? Me too. I dunno if I'm even gonna upgrade, way too much work for how much benefit?

Sooooo I wrote my own karma hack this evening. For version 1.whatever. You can see it in action:

http://www.overgrow.com/edge/showthread.php?threadid=20338

It is based on w.luke's implementation; I just added the "alert moderator" but I doubt I will add post comments.

It does have interesting ways of determining karmic power-- how many karma points a user awards per click.. it's based on a formula that uses date joined, posts, and karma level.. so older and more respected users will give 5 or 8 points per click while new members will only give 1.

Otherwise I believe the functionality is the same as Sitepoint's. It does not add any overhead or extra queries in showthread. Eventually I will integrate it with the Killfile hack so that people can Killfile any user with a Karma below a level they set.

If there is still interest in something like this for the 1.x VB, let me know....


OG

[Edited by Overgrow on 01-17-2001 at 04:44 AM]

Oh yea, It uses VB cookies to determine who you are... so if you're not registered you won't even see the Karma icon (lower right of each post).

It could be me man, but I'm not logged into your forum but I still see the karma ratings. Maybe since I already have the cookies from another vB?

Would love to use this on my forum when you get everything done on it. Thanks for your time put into the hack I think this could be something very cool from my users to play with :)

I also like the report to admin feature. That would save me alot of time. Can this report to Board Mod's as well as Admins? I have board mods than run diffrent sections so it would be nice to be able to send it to the right mod. Just a few things to think about :)

Change is Coming...
http://bbs.startalent.tv/sttv/

Yo this is sweet....can I get it? ;)

I'm still using 1.13 cause of all the hacks and customizations I have...it rocks...I love oyur hack...please share. :)

If you're not logged in you will still see everyone's karmic ratings-- but you won't see the little karma icon in the lower right of each post that allows you to adjust it.

OK, let me finish the bug hunt and package it up. I did not write it intending to release, so I'm not sure how portable I made everything.. I think it is pretty good though, one karma.php file and then a few mods in showthread and postbit and you're done.

I did finish the alert mod function. I have no idea how Sitepoint's works, but the way mine works is that it just sets a flag in the karma table on that postID. So it's easy to run a query-- show all posts in the karma table that have the alert flag on. Then the mods can scroll through the alerted list and see what's up.. there is no functionality to route a message anywhere. If you tell me how you think it should work, I might figure something out. Right now I just have the mods run "alertmod.php" which will bring up all of the alerted threads with a function to turn all alerts off after they have been viewed.

Give me a day or two to make sure I have it in a complete tested form before releasing. The users really like it so far!

Oh yea, it does not use templates at this time for the karma popup box so you'll have to edit the code to make it look better.. the version I release will be a simplified layout without all my tables and graphics in the karma popup.

ya where can we get this?>

You can get it... here
...tomorrow
...or at least by this weekend

I am still adding things.. I just wrote it yesterday evening but not much to fix thankfully!

I just added another safeguard to prevent smear campaigns. Already I had users going for the throat.. searching out one person's posts and giving them all 10 shots of negative karma that they could.

I added another field so it records the last 5 people you gave karma to. You must now spread your love around.. you cannot repeatedly give karma to the same person (if they are in that list)....

so effectively with 10 possible karma awards per 24 hours, you could only hit the same person twice with negative karma. And the people doing these smear campaigns probably have low karma themselves meaning their smear campaigns will have little effect!

ahh what a nice balanced feeling....

Are you by chance going to allow comments?

So you could leave

"This post was completely false, they just made it up."

Like display on profile or another page, the top 10 good things and bad things.

This way you could see that Tom always is full of shit?

Hmmm.. I'm still not sure about the comment system. While it might be interesting to look in someone's profile and see the last few comments people have made about their posts I really don't think it would be used that much.

At least on my boards, if someone wants to "leave a comment" saying your post was wrong, they'll just reply and leave it right there for everyone to see.

Since Sitepoint's comments weren't functional (I don't think?) I wasn't sure what exactly they were supposed to do. Seemed kind of frivolous and unnecessary when we are working with a database-comment system already. Can you point out any advantages or uses of it that I might be overlooking? Removing the comment box from the karma pop up really simplified the look and apparent learning curve.

Tom would have 5 glowing red karmasticks and everyone would know that he is full of the shit :)

Sitepoint's comments are functional, take a look at wluke's profile.

Ah thanks freddie.. Wonderful profile page too, something I'll have to emulate at some point :) w.luke has some of the slickest forums this side of uhh.. Overgrow

I do see the point of comments but I guess I missed the full implementation. Was there any way to see specific comments on a specific post?

Sitepoint has taken down their karma system for re-coding.. I do wonder what he's up to now? Makes me feel like I'm keeping up with the Joneses trying to guess what features he is going to add.

I think my system is working pretty well.. I believe I have some safeguards that he didn't:

1) no more than 10 karmas per 24 hours
2) must karma 5 other people before karma'ing the same person again
3) amount you karma per click varies by a good formula so better users give better karma, offsetting any idiot vindictiveness (and those idiots can only give 2 per day to you anyway)

Good I am glad you developed it on your own. This will probably be well received. I am in the process of re-writing my hack. This is being done to redo some things requested by my members. Since it is supposed to be their system. I am also streamlining it so the code is tighter and uses less resources.

However since I was never going to release Karma for the 1.1.X platform your hack will be mighty useful for those who don't or can't upgrade.

p.s. My comments are currently functional in the way that I had intended them to be.

Originally posted by Overgrow
Ah thanks freddie.. Wonderful profile page too, something I'll have to emulate at some point :) w.luke has some of the slickest forums this side of uhh.. Overgrow

Thanks for the profile page.. However I can't take credit for the Forums themselves. They are an evolving system where the users have just as much say in the overall design as I do.

Ah good.. I was going to write you and ask if you wanted me to change the name of my hack. Since yours is 2.x only I think Karma for 1.x works for me.

I went back and read all of your older karma threads including the new updates you are planning. Honestly I think I prefer my system-- but that's because I wrote mine and you wrote yours. I played with implementing a few of the ideas from your latest thread... I didn't care for the ratio of pos/neg determining the number of karmastars (owens idea). It looks great on paper but doesn't work so well in action.

If a user had just 1 negative karma point and 0 positive, they have a 100% negative ratio and would show 5 negative marks. Ahh I see the difference though, you don't show "negative stars" where I do.

Still, if a user had just 1 pos and 0 neg, they had 5 stars.. but someone with 30 pos and 5 neg would have 4. That doesn't make sense to me, the second person should have a higher rating in my eyes. Extrapolating it out to when people have lots more karma, I tried adding 1 extra star for each 100 positive marks you had and that helped but made the "rules" so confusing it looked like a mess when I explained it.

So I went back to the straight 1 mark for every 100 points, no more %ratios. I scrambled to add the datafields to track user's positive and negative karma separately instead of just the total.. that is useful info in case I want to use it in the future, so good to get that in the code from the start.

Your comments do look useful and I may decide to do something like that in a future update.

OG

I think I prefer wluke's system but either way the system needs to be worked out overtime so we can consider karma for inclusion into v2.x

Are you going to release this hack? Sorry if you already answered this. :)

Sorry, yes, I'm just getting it right. I apologize for the delay (uhh who was harping about 2.0? it wasn't me I SWEAR)... I just want to release it when it's correct and I've had to work on stuff that actually pays bills lately. Soon, very soon...

Originally posted by Overgrow
Sorry, yes, I'm just getting it right. I apologize for the delay (uhh who was harping about 2.0? it wasn't me I SWEAR)... I just want to release it when it's correct and I've had to work on stuff that actually pays bills lately. Soon, very soon...

It'd be nice to take a look at it -- at FanHome I wrote some sort of basic post / thread rating scheme where the focus was more on rating the post / thread and not on the user as much. How has the success been of your system? The reaction has been so-so from our users, but somehow my rating is the highest (I swear I didn't stuff it!! ;)) so people *are* using it. (I hide the user ratings -- it's never shown except through the number of "stars" a thread gets on the forumdisplay, which is only constant at the creation of a thread.).

Hi mrogish, you can see it live at OG:

http://www.overgrow.com/edge

You do have to register to see the Karma rating button and to see how you rate a post. If you do register to try it out, don't worry, since your new member rating is only worth a point, it won't throw anything off.

So far it has actually been working and has been well received. Mostly good karma all around. The safeguards preventing users from karma'ing people more than once every few times and only so many per day... well it all ties in to make it fairly balanced I think. No one can upset the balance too easily since older, respected members wield big sticks of flaming karma with way more power than a newb or a troll.

It really is a post rating system, the idea is to rate the post and not necessarily the user who said it.. but it all reflects on that person of course. I'm using little green bars under the name, and I also didn't stack the deck but was the first to get one... lots of people gave me a good shot for the original Karma post.

I don't show numbers... You get a karmalight for every 100 cumulative pos points, and I also put a text rating system in to make it a little more interesting... mouseover the karma lights or click on them-- you'll see people's text ratings change every 10 points or 50 points later on. (ie, user1 has very little negative karma.. user2 has some positive karma... user3 has quite positive)

Originally posted by Overgrow
Hi mrogish, you can see it live at OG:

http://www.overgrow.com/edge

You do have to register to see the Karma rating button and to see how you rate a post. If you do register to try it out, don't worry, since your new member rating is only worth a point, it won't throw anything off.


Originally posted by Overgrow
So far it has actually been working and has been well received. Mostly good karma all around. The safeguards preventing users from karma'ing people more than once every few times and only so many per day... well it all ties in to make it fairly balanced I think. No one can upset the balance too easily since older, respected members wield big sticks of flaming karma with way more power than a newb or a troll.


Good to hear that. From browsing the FanHome DB I can see that out of 16000+ users only 300 have had their ratings change -- and 200 or so are above the starting level of 100 "points" that I gave everyone. I have something along those lines -- essentially the user rating is turned into a range of 1 to infinity number of stars, so when they rate a post it is either +1 * star rating to the post or a flat rate of -1 for bad. I'm not sure if the balance is perfect but it at least allows for "more good" to come from the system than bad. Also, users without a certain number of posts can't rate posts / threads -- I did this so that if someone was exceptionally bored and made 100 hotmail accounts he/she couldn't totally destroy a certain user.

Originally posted by Overgrow
It really is a post rating system, the idea is to rate the post and not necessarily the user who said it.. but it all reflects on that person of course. I'm using little green bars under the name, and I also didn't stack the deck but was the first to get one... lots of people gave me a good shot for the original Karma post.


I guess I got the impression that the users were rating each other because each user was associated with a "value" (even if as esoteric as a red dot).

On the flip side, it shows at a glance who is a poor poster and who is well liked, whereas in my system it's hidden from view for the most part.

Originally posted by Overgrow
I don't show numbers... You get a karmalight for every 100 cumulative pos points, and I also put a text rating system in to make it a little more interesting... mouseover the karma lights or click on them-- you'll see people's text ratings change every 10 points or 50 points later on. (ie, user1 has very little negative karma.. user2 has some positive karma... user3 has quite positive)

That's pretty neat -- I think the Karma system is very well thought out and would provide benefit to most forums as their size increases to a level such as yours. I originally thought of an addition to it of a "trust" system -- where it kept track of who you had given positive ratings from, and if you had enough you would inherit some of that user's ratings -- thereby changing the star value of each thread and tailoring the forumdisplay -- recommending threads that you might like at the top, and then a listing of all of the rest would be below. I thought that would be too complex for most users, so I just set it up so that, in your profile, you could say "Hide threads with a star value of < X". This way you could hide all threads that have been knocked down enough -- instead of having the system generate ?top? picks for you, essentially the community kills the ?noise? instead.

Different strategies, but it all comes down to (as I think you said) self or community moderation! :)

*still waiting the release of this hack*

Overgrow, how close are you to releasing this hack?

It reminds me the name of this thread... "Tired of waiting..." :D

I really like the concept and hope to see it included in VB 2.0. I especially like how members with more posts give more karma...

[MikeE]

Still waiting for the release.

[intellected]

Bump. Hmm. Bumb. Yes.

[caserini]

is someone ever going to release it?

:(

[aldamon]

Um, <cough> Overgrow, you might want to mention your site's content above your link in the original post...I'm viewing this at work and I don't really want to get fired. Thanks!

[Aman]

I just love my Karma hack! Thank you Overgrow. However, I just upgraded to vb 2.2.0 and my karma disappeared. Does anyone know how to get the karma back? Thanks in advance.

[Reeve of shinra]

You might have to reinstall the hack, or the parts of the template that refer to the hack. -- check over the installation instructions and see everything is where it should be.

[Aman]

Thank you for the reply. Have you tried your recommendation successfully yourself? I ask this because last time I reinstalled the karma hack I had duplicates of the options, the hack still didn't work, and everything was a big mess. Overgrow graciously fixed everything but I didn't wish to hassle him again with fixing the same problem as if I didn't learn from previous mistakes. Anyway, I also sent an email to Overgrow because I purchased the email support licence and hopefully will get an answer back from him if noone else knows how to fix the hack after the 2.2.0 upgrade.

[Reeve of shinra]

"Have you tried your recommendation successfully yourself?"

No, sweet as Overgrows hack is, we never purchased/downloaded it.

He should be able to explain what you need to change though to get it to work again with the upgrade - good luck =)

[Aman]

Thank you. Hopefully I will get a reply soon.

[igowoofwoof]

so, can anybody tell me where i can get this hack?

[Aaow AnD wHiTe]

Wow! We have missed out this thread :) it's a very old thread, but we've checked out overgrow's page and we've seen that he has karma running in vB 2.2.1. We're really impressed. It would be an amazing adition to our forums!! ^^

[Freddie Bingham]

You could wait until vB 3 ;)

[GraphicW]

I see you are dropping hints Freddie. hehehe! :p

[TheComputerGuy]

This is a great hack, and works in 2.2.2 no problems, cept you must modify the admin/index.php.

He was selling this for around 50-60 last time I saw, worth I say

[TELEK]

You have to PAY! Is this still true, because I was reading this thread and getting excited, and now it says I have to pay :(

Why didn't someone say that sooner?

[Freddie Bingham]

vB3 has karma based off of this hack built in.

[N!ck]

is it toggleable?

[Overgrow]

Hey you used my code, cool deal freddie... Since I donated my code to vB3, I think I deserve a bit of spam leeway here......

For those who can't wait, I will take PayPal of $30 and you can have the newest installable package immediately for 2.2.x.

http://www.overgrow.com/edge/buykarma.php

Older users, if you want an update to the Karma package, drop me an email.