Most of you have a rich experience in that matter. I read your comments with very much interest. I intend to implement on my site a system which would permit a valorization of most pertinent contributions. I was considering implement reputation system in my vB forums. I see it could be easily perverted.

So. What do think about a more "sophisticated" system like vBcredits ?

Have you tried modifying the way it works? Something along those lines but changing it to take into account your opinion? Here's how I would implement such a thing:

1. State somewhere obvious that you encourage your users to do reputation, good and bad!
2. Disable viewing of reputation, so that they don't know how bad they are doing.
3. Build a registration plugin that checks IP addresses and use for two things:
   1. Check IP addresses on registration, helping in the "double accounts" problem.
   2. Check the IP of the post they are giving reputation to, and the IP of the person giving reputation. If they are the same, spout out an error and not send the reputation.
4. At the end of each day, with that cron job, have it determine who should be banned based on the reputation and post a separate thread for each member.
5. Manually ban (or set up a database back end w/ auto banning in the ACP) each member that you feel deserves it.
6. Use the ban reason as "Your Members have agreed you needed banned for a bit."

The only thing you wouldn't tell your users, is how they agreed or just tell them and mention the fact that you have restrictions in place.

This way, you have your precautions and you have the "group moderation" that you original intended.

My personal opinion is that this would make an interesting topic / experiment.

Actually, on further thought, you could take this as another spin. Instead of banning, send PMs or Emails warning them. If they reach a number of days (say 4 days out of 14) where the users want them banned, then you ban them anyways for say, a week. If they get more than that (ban every two weeks) they get a harsher ban.

That way, they are given warning, the group moderation is in effect, and you still get the final decision. :D

I turned it off, because members gave each other rep for liking each other and not for the value of the post.

I was rather keen to get the "group moderation" via reputation thing working as I thought that this would be a great "selling point" for my site and to some degree reduce the moderation workload. I know realise that this was extremely naive.

I hoped that constructive negative comments would cause members to behave, which to some degree it did. However the abusive reps eroded the value of the truly useful ones. In 3 months of running the system around 15k neg reps were given, of which around 2k were abusive/pointless/meaningless. I was prepared to accept some level of abuse however the reality was far more than I expected.

I tried so many different variations of configurations and hacks to mitigate abuse, however none had an impact, as examples:

- Disabled viewing of reputation comments, which proved pointless as a receiving member could not learn from the valid comments.
- Removed the ability to give reputation in some forums (i.e. General Chat), members would then simply find posts in other areas of the site and give negative reputation against that instead.
- Started a three strike moderation system for abuse rep, 1st strike warning, 2nd strike all neg rep ever given by the user removed, 3rd strike all pos rep the user has ever received removed. This had no effect, members seemed quite happy to kill their own reputation just to send an abusive rep comment.
- Created a simple IP check for aliases repping each other.
- Made the rules, guidelines and consequences extremely obvious to all members

As EWGF said, no matter what I did rep was used to express personal opinions about personalities, not the value of the post.

In addition to this it was used as a method of abusing site newbies

Now all this sounds like a run a forum populated by children, however the average age of my sites members is mid 30's!!! So the idiots triad stands and reputation is dead.

Group moderation on paper sounds like a great and almost utopic idea, however IME in the real world it just simply doesn't work

<font color="darkgreen">Why type of site do you run? Maybe the type will have something to do with it too? </font>

And what if we have
- reputation system on but only with moderators able to give positive or negative notes
and
- 'Post thank you' system on for registered users (which has also an effect on the reputation of contributors, but only in a positive way...)

??

Has anybody tried that ?

reputation is a tricky thing. I'm a member of a forum that uses it and i'm not a fan.

it creates elitism with the different tiers. you also get people excess posting in order to increase their reputation ability.

and when bans are issued if your rep goes to low, sometimes you get people teaming up on people.

I've seen it in action. When I was merely a member of my main forum, it was enabled. Back then, I had the tales to tell related to the core of the site. I was leader of the board for reputation points for ages. Six months after leaving the job involved, I was still fourth.

I saw one poster - someone I liked immensely - brought down from third place to negative reputation by two or three cliques.

Human nature is such that I don't see that it will work properly without the species evolving more, especially when you understand that people are more likely to have a go at people they can't see.

When I took over the site and moved to VB, I disabled it immediately.

Rapscallion

I think that the reputation system can only work as a moderated system. i.e. have mods approve each rating.