[King Kovifor]

Originally Posted by MrEyes

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

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.