User Reputations in vb.org ON or OFF?

[Logician]

Dear vB.org Members,

We like to hear your opinions about turning on user reputations here in vb.org. We haven't decided about this yet but we are considering the issue. There can be pros and cons of turning them on and we like you to discuss them. Good karma can be useful to encourage our expert users to release more hacks, give support for their hacks or answer the questions of newbie users in our forum. On the other hand we don't want this be abused like bad karmas becoming a discouregement for some of our members. (For example a member can give bad karma in a hack thread when hacker does not reply his question and this can discourage hacker about sharing his other hacks in vb.org etc.)

So we can leave them as they are (off) or we can turn them on and give it a shot. Please give your 2 cents and we appreciate if you :
a) Consider the issue by regarding the characteristic of vb.org
b) Give your reasons while voting.

Thank you.

[sabret00the]

i think the main thing is like when we install hacks or need help the reputations would enable us to go straight to the most helpful people and speed the process up completely.

[Zachery]

Originally Posted by sabret00the

i think the main thing is like when we install hacks or need help the reputations would enable us to go straight to the most helpful people and speed the process up completely.

I think reputation works well for new forums, however long established forums usualy have a problem when its introduced. its usualy abused in some way.

:/

[Dean C]

Originally Posted by sabret00the

i think the main thing is like when we install hacks or need help the reputations would enable us to go straight to the most helpful people and speed the process up completely.

Yep but just because someone is helpful around the forums doesn't mean they want to be contacted privately to offer support necessarily (if that's what your implying)

[sabret00the]

nah i'm not but for example you have two hacks, similar and one authros got high reputation, the others is really low, then it's gotta be because ones more helpful than the others?

[Dean C]

My arguement is against this because it's not a true representation of how helpful people really are. Also it promotes the idea of a social hiearchy which is open to bias from favoritism. What you said is true sabert00the in theory, but in practice I doubt it'll work that way. For example someone may not like someone and make it their mission to go rounding giving that user negative karma. See what I mean, it's so open to corruption and unjust karma in this case

[AlexanderT]

Originally Posted by tenbucks

Perhaps turn it on but disable negative reputation?

Yup that is what I did and it made everyone a lot friendlier

[Dan]

I think they should be on but they shouldn't be available to just people who are starting out within the community here. Maybe they could be used as a way to gauge a persons hacking abaility or helpfulness? Like Idea1 you could turn it on only for the hacking section and only for the first post in the thread. So we could gauge the hacker and how much people like the person. Another idea would be to give 'reputation' when a person is helpful maybe we could have a staff member dedicated to doing this for the forums and the rest of the staff could help out?

Well that's my two pence but I think it should be turned on

[Brad]

Originally Posted by Dan

I think they should be on but they shouldn't be available to just people who are starting out within the community here. Maybe they could be used as a way to gauge a persons hacking abaility or helpfulness? Like Idea1 you could turn it on only for the hacking section and only for the first post in the thread. So we could gauge the hacker and how much people like the person. Another idea would be to give 'reputation' when a person is helpful maybe we could have a staff member dedicated to doing this for the forums and the rest of the staff could help out?

Well that's my two pence but I think it should be turned on

I voted for leave them off, I've seen what it can do to communitys before and I don't want to see it happen here to. At any rate if it dose get turned on I'll just disable it in my profile

[twoseven]

leave it off unless you revamp the system just a waste of precious eye space as it is