The grand reputation experiment...
 

On my site - http://ebassist.com ( but the forum is at http://ebassist.com/vb3 ) I'm trying a simple social engineering experiment. I'm interested in other folks' opinion.

I have the board set to ban a user when his reputation dips below zero - and started everyone with 50 reputation points. I've made it clear to my users that admin will take a really dim view of a group of users that lock out another user just for fun.

I still think I'll need someone with elevated permissions available to respond to emergencies or if a user with a high rep goes off his meds and into troll mode, but the goal is to provide an essentially self-governing community.

What do y'all think? Anybody tried anything like this - and if so, how did it work?

cheers -

allan

Fixed the typo in your forums url :) This is very interesting. Please let us know how it evolves!

Thanks for fixing the URL, Dean ;)

I'll keep y'all posted. I am interested in pointers from folks that might have tried something like this and am also interested in opinions from everyone.

cheers -

Well, such things can work, but just in small till medium sized communities.

Big communities normally are more problematical on those issues due to elitaeral thinkings and such.

I dunno - Slashdot does a pretty good job of letting the community manage itself, but then they don't ban anybody. It'll be interesting ;)

I do appreciate your thoughts, Xenon. My community isn't real big and almost everyone knows everyone else. It's probably not a good cross-section of the Internet at large. You may be right ;)

tanks!

At first glance it sounds like a really bad idea, but an interesting one nonetheless. If it's a small close-knit community I imagine there'd be no problems, and probably no one being banned. But on larger boards it has the potential to get way out of hand. As long as the admins are keeping a close eye on it it'll be neat to see how it works.

:D I'm guessing members can only spread reputation so much per day so that they can't just gob someone with karma all at once?

Yup.?

Users can hit ten people a day and can only hit the same person once every ten times ;)

D'oh, you mentioned that in the first post and I even read it. Just forgot to file it properly so it' slipped outta me brain. *notes*

Best of luck with the experiment!

It seems a nice idea, but as its been said, I dont think it would work on large communities, or realy small ones