Spreading Reputation Recognition of Merit

[mavr1c]

I have tried a couple of times to rcognise the merits of a post only to be told "YOU MUST"
spread reputation around before user XXXXX.
How silly can this get? Many post grbage day in day our or reply without understanding the question yet when you recognise the merits of a post you are prevented from adding to the reputation of an astute poster.

I am sure most don't give a hoot about the reputation but being prevented from recognising intelligence is a slap in the face of both the poster and the one attempting to give credit where credit is due.

 

[Zubair]

View this thread http://x10hosting.com/forums/news-announcements/101423-reputation-explained.html

Reputation system is totally explained there.

 

[mavr1c]

Your bat, your ball, your game but this is nonsense. If someone keeps posting value they are deprived of getting credit. Perhaps the system was abused as described by Cory but if you prevent recognition the system sucks. I recently noted someone wondering why the sytem was slow at times - 3 second load for a page while 10-15 seconds another time of day and the "support" response was clean up your code. Really helpful NOT. Maintenance and other system loads can slow the system down significantly and perhaps a statistic/graphic indicating system load at various times of day may be of value, but code will not slow the response time down that significantly from one time of day to another. But I digress ...

Abandoning the system would be more logical than preventing valuble posts/posters from being given due credit. Hardly likely I will ever try to recognise value if it has become meaningless and a waste of my time.

 

[Corey]

I have no idea what you are talking about with the first part of your post as you seem to have went off track so I will not respond to it...

Regarding your issue with the reputation system, it is made to allow a person to advance forward in rankings on the forums. Why should you be able to give the same person reputation multiple times within a short period of time? People can easily take advantage of that system and they were doing just that with so called "rep clubs". We do not have time to moderate every rep given on this forum and this is an easy way to make sure that reputation is given out fairly. If a person is constantly helping they will receive a lot of rep and it works exactly as intended. Zubair for example has over 200. I see no issues with the current system and it will remain the same. Thank you for your feedback, however.

 

[essellar]

"Advancement" can happen organically, though. For instance, I have a bit of a reputation on the IBM Lotus Developer Domain, gained from a combination of something in excess of 16,000 postings and the technical merit of those postings (dealing with a platform I grok in ways I don't with the LAMP stack). There are no "levels" there, nor are there reputation points of any sort, but I know that when people search the LDD forums they'll often look for returned results bearing my name (from thank-you emails I've been sent and blog postings by other developers I respect). There is little incentive, though, to provide the sort of consistently good, comprehensive answers that, say, Misson provides here, other than altruism -- I haven't seen many other responses that merit rep awards in quite the same way, so requiring recognition of others (including my own feeble attempts) before upping Misson's rep again is artificial and arbitrary. I realise that there is a potential for abuse ("rep clubs"), but if there are going to be rep points, they should be tied to real merit.

 

[Corey]

The idea is that most of the rep will be coming from the free hosting support forums and that there are so many users that this should not be an issue, in any given day there are over 100 unique users with posts there. You are allowed to rep someone if you liked their post or they helped you, you just need to wait until you can do it again. I guess I fail to see the problem with this. I'm open to change things if an idea is suggested that will work.

Here is some examples that the current system will prevent and what I don't want.

Joe who is new posts a support thread, they get help from me so they rep me. Joe has no idea what he is doing so he then posts 15 more support threads in the next 2 or 3 days, each time I respond I get another rep from Joe, mostly because he now likes me for helping him so much. I've now gained over 15 rep in 2 or 3 days.

Bob is trying to get to 50 rep to gain some additional benefits so he sends his friends links to his posts and requests them to rep him, he has 10 friends and each one reps him 5 times over the course of a week.

If you can think of a better way than how we are currently doing it please post it.

 

[essellar]

I fail to see what's wrong with Joe repping you if you're offering real help in that scenario -- you should be getting up-repped for that, and it falls in line with the way real reputation works in the real world. It's the rewards that promote abuse of the system, not the points per se.

I realise that it's not easy to do something like this fairly. I think the closest I've seen to a good implementation is what they're doing at StackOverflow -- it's the answers that get the reputation (up and down votes), and there's both a computational and a strong cultural prohibition against asking for help that could have been found with a search. (Not nearly so easy with a free hosting solution as it is on a professional programmers' resource, I know.) Individual reputation is merely a reflection of top answers, and privilege elevation is modded/by committee. Again, not easy, and requires extra work load for those in the "college".

I'm not out to start a war here or anything -- particularly in light of what I'm paying for the privilege of being in this conversation at all. I just want to point out that if there are to be reputation points at all, then requiring people to hand out rep points to undeserving individuals is an obstacle to rewarding the people who are the heart and soul of the community's support system -- particularly for those who take the time to search before posting.

 

[Livewire]

So do what I do - find some deserving helpers who are also helping users and rep them too

That's the eventual solution; there's nothing saying the one giving the rep has to be the one who was actually helped.