What is your experience of Reputation
 

Every forum admin knows that due to something I call the IIT* moderation is a necesary evil, however every admin also knows that more often than not community members like to deconstruct and question your every moderation move.

As a result of this I decided to try using Reputation as a method of allowing the community to self moderate. In summary the system I implemented worked as follows:

I had a simple cron script that every hour checked every user that had received negative rep in the last hour. If the volume of neg rep was greater than a certain amount (dependent on how many people were online), the user would receive an infraction. This would then hook into the banning system behind infractions. So if UserX was being disruptive the community could effectively "group moderate" that person and give them a temporary ban.

Now in theory this, to me at least, seems like a good idea. However in the real world abuse of the reputation system was uncontrollable and therefore it would have been forum suicide to implement the "group moderate" system described above.

As an example of some of the issues:

• Intially members could see who had left reputation, this was disabled as revenge repping was common place.
• Reputation comments became a replacement for discussion
• Members with alias accounts pos repping the accounts they held
• Members with alias account double/triple neg repping somebody
• No comments left
• Silly comments left
• Abusive comment left
• etc etc etc

In the end, I simply disabled the system as it was proving to be far more divisive than I ever imagined it would be and I was spending far to much time looking into rep reports.

So I am curious to learn what experiences other forum admins have of the reputation system, do you use it? does your community use it positively? Have you tried it and killed it?


* IIT - Internet Idiots Triad

Internet + Anonymity + Audience = Idiot

My experience is that reputation has not had too much actual use, and that most people don't seemingly care about it. Sure, I get the odd new user question about what it is, but most members are probably too distracted by other forum features to use it.

I know, probably quite unusual, since I have found that the blogs, social groups, albums and profile comments all took off massively on my own forum, but I don't really hear much about the reputation system at all.

most of the parenting websites are using reputations to play "tag, you're it"... that is stupid in a certain point of view, but people like to rep others to say i love you...

Positive rep. doesn't seem like a bad idea, the problem arises really when people start dishing out negative rep. Some people take it seriously some brush it aside, to be honest I don't its up to members to decide who should get negative reputation that is the job of the Administrator or Moderator (to punish if need be e.t.c.). But for saying thanks for doing stuff I feel its perfect. :rolleyes:

You always get a nice fuzzy feeling inside you when you get a bit of +ve rep... or maybe thats just me. :erm:

<font color="darkgreen">Reps have been good on several sites I either moderate or am a member of. The best thing is usually keeping the person who left the rep hidden from the rep table in the users control panel. This helps eliviate the retailitation effect. Also, keeping the sprea at a reasonable level and if anyone is caught creating an alternate account which is repping the other then that is grounds for zero'ing out their reps and/or a temporary ban.

You wouldnt believe the competition that can arise from the desire to have the most Gems. Usually it helps raise the level of posts in both quality and quanity.

They seem to work best on technical sites where you need to display some sort of knowledge vs just posting opinions which can be taken different ways.</font>

This was something that started to happen on my site, the subject of the forum is something where people ask questions and receive answers from the community and as you said there was some "virtual kudos" from having those little green gems.

However my site also has a general chat area which is where all the abusive and stupid negative reputation was coming from. For a short time I disabled negative rep on that forum however users were simply finding posts the user had made elsewhere and repping these with silly comments.

As mentioned in the end I decided to disable it, so now I am looking for an alternative. Probably something like the "Post Thankyou" mod available here.

I really wanted the "community moderation" thing to work, however while on paper it seemed like a good idea, in the real world it turned into a nightmare. A nightmare that was compounded by the fact that in order to remove a rep comment a moderator would have to have full admincp permissions which is something I would never give.

<font color="darkgreen">Its just simple, as if you were to put in a new system you would still have to make some sort of announcement of the new rles. Do a draft on new rules that will be enforced and stick it in your site feedback forum. Make the announcement that any cheating found will cause them to lose all their rep points. The fear of loosing their reps will keep the vast majority from trying to cheat the syetm again. Then do enforce it stroingly in te beginning as that will show them you mean what you say. Even with the Thank You hack there is still the same cheating present. Basically you need to step up and show them you are the Admin and will enforce your rules.

Chit chat is always a forum where I have Reps disabled. Reps should only be active in forums where the posts are of actual value.

the competition was mainly of good clean nature and we have members with 2,000+ reps over a 4 year period. 10 rep spread and the usual increment of power.</font>

Personally i think any use of the Reputation system for anything else then just that will be abused on most communities. So don't tie it to anything else (like the original example).

As soon as the reputation gets a "value" it will be abused.

People will try to find value in anything - if it's not reputation, it's post count or something else entirely. I've always felt with a little modification, reputation can be a very positive tool within a community.

That summed it up perfectly. In my own experience, I've found different types of communities handle reputation differently. It all depends on the age group, niche, relevance, and need. I've found the Activity Mod to be very helpful in keeping an active, reputable group of members without cheating.