What is your experience of Reputation

[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