Grey reputation

[polo_pro]

For folks who don't know what "reputation" is, it's a way that your fellow chat members can collectively suggest that others read your posts. To use this feature, you simply click the scale icon in the lower left of any post or reply. The scale icon is between the "online/offline" cirular icon and the "report this post" triangle/warning icon.

If you click on this scale icon in one of your own posts, it tells you how many reputation points you have. If you click on this scale icon in someone else's post, then a small window pops up where you can select "I approve" or "I disapprove", and you can also enter a line of text explaining why you chose one or the other. If you don't enter any text, the recipient won't know why you liked or disliked what they posted about nor will they know who you are.

About every 2 weeks someone gives me rep points, but very often instead of green (approval), I end up with grey rep points which don't change my reputation at all. I'm not sure, but I think this may happen if the person giving rep points has handed out rep points to me already? But at this point I feel gipped having had this happen a dozen times.

ps - Maybe the real solution is getting more people to use the reputation feature. Oh, and Pam, I'm not asking you to adjust my rep points. I prefer to get them legitimately.

[polo_pro]

Well, some kind folks gave me rep points for this post (and they weren't greyed out...yeah!), but had a further question of how to compare people's reputation. Unfortunately, while you can see your own quantitative rep score, you can only see a generalized version of other people's rep score. For other people you'll instead see:

"plo is on a distinguished road" or
"plo will be famous soon enough" or
"plo has a spectacular aura about" ....

where each saying corresponds to a range of rep score (like 0 to 50, 51 to 100, 101 to 201, etc). Anytime you hold your mouse over someone's rep icon (usually one small green square in the left column below their post count), this phrase appears. That's the only feedback you get about other's reputation. I suppose someday people will have two or more small green squares but to do that...well, we all need to start giving each other pats on the back when we do a good job!

ps - I think the reason for using vague phrases is to avoid competitiveness as people might try to edge each other out if their rep points are close (and they knew the exact number of rep points each had).

[ryan_walters]

Assuming the board is using default values for reputation, the following table would define points values to the phrase.

http://files.vbulletin.com/doc_images/reputation/reputation_manager.png

I don't know what the grey reputation is used for. I had a grey one in my list, but they're all green now. Maybe they have to be approved?

As far as for when you can give someone points the second time is determined by "reputation user spread" detailed here (http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/vboptions_reputation). But I don't know the default value, assuming the board is currently set to default. Or even if this has anything to do with the grey rep.

[nickyboy]

Sorry to appear a little slow, I guess its an age thing.
Can I acctually see who is issueing/giving me rep points? I appear to have 10 but am blowed if I know how I got them, is that a standard "starter" score and you earn extra or get them deleted for being, erm shall we say not so good.
I add to a persons reputation if I think a comment is partically valid, or if someone is extra helpful with advice etc? I assume thats about right.

Nick

[gbrandwood]

Nick, you are right (not about being slow or it being an age thing though). You give points based on whether you think someone's post merits it. If you think it was particularly bad or uncalled for, then you can give negative points. I think we all start with 0. And, unless the person who gives you your points decides to identify themselves in the brief comment space, then you've no way of knowing who they were. They sometimes don't even say why. Look in your profile to see if any comments have been left. I make it policy now to put my username in the points I dish out.

For one post, for example (one comment), I got something like -30 rep points and it has taken me months to claw them back. Did these folk identify themselves? Nope. Do I care? Nope. Are they wasting their time? Yup.

[polo_pro]

Sorry to appear a little slow, I guess its an age thing.
Can I acctually see who is issueing/giving me rep points? I appear to have 10 but am blowed if I know how I got them, is that a standard "starter" score and you earn extra or get them deleted for being, erm shall we say not so good.
I add to a persons reputation if I think a comment is partically valid, or if someone is extra helpful with advice etc? I assume thats about right.

Nick
In answer to your first question, push "User CP" on the menu bar at the top of this web page. You'll see a section called "Latest Reputation Received" and my comment as I added to your rep.

I'm not sure how many rep points an account starts with?

In answer to your last question, you decide what conditions to add to someone else's rep. Personally, I feel that people should add to others rep often until we all get use to using it. Your reasons are quite valid too, but in practice I'm sure groups of people have "love fests" where they add rep to everyone in their group. There's a mechanism in place to prevent this, because if you try to add to someone else's rep too often it won't take it.

ps - I got two more grey reps in the last few days. If folks don't mind, leave your name in the comment of the rep form because I'm not sure if grey rep comes from getting multiple reps from the same person.

[bentbiker]

I make it policy now to put my username in the points I dish out.



Good suggestion. I tried to give you rep points, but had given you some earlier and now I must spread the wealth before I can give you anymore. Please withhold any further good suggestions until I'm in a position to suitably recognize you for them? :) Seems questionable (I had a stronger word here) as to why I can't reward the same person in different threads when he makes contributions in both. Also seems inapproriate for negative points to be awarded without identifying yourself. In fact, its a shame all comments don't show the name of the person awarding the points, but maybe history has shown this to be the better way.

[bentbiker]

. . . I'm not sure if grey rep comes from getting multiple reps from the same person.
I have noticed, as you noted in an earlier post, that all awards with no comment are grey. What I don't know is whether that means anything regarding point totals; perhaps the points only accrue if you add a comment???? Anybody know? Otherwise, the grey squares are of questionable value as I can already tell that there are no comments.

[polo_pro]

Good suggestion. I tried to give you rep points, but had given you some earlier and now I must spread the wealth before I can give you anymore. Please withhold any further good suggestions until I'm in a position to suitably recognize you for them? :) Seems questionable (I had a stronger word here) as to why I can't reward the same person in different threads when he makes contributions in both. Also seems inapproriate for negative points to be awarded without identifying yourself. In fact, its a shame all comments don't show the name of the person awarding the points, but maybe history has shown this to be the better way.

I think the reason that people aren't allowed to give positive feed back to a person for multiple threads is the potential for abuse. I recollect a problem with this when we switched to this forum early last year. If my memory is correct, I don't think the abuse went on too much before being caught.

I know it's hard to believe, but I've actually gotten negative feedback?! It happened once last year, and I'd say in the interest of minimizing flame fests anonimity should remain an option.

[Timezkware Tim]

On another forum, I put myself on ignore, and all my posts disappeared. I fact, I'm going to try that right n

[nickyboy]

In answer to your first question, push "User CP" on the menu bar at the top of this web page. You'll see a section called "Latest Reputation Received" and my comment as I added to your rep.

I'm not sure how many rep points an account starts with?

In answer to your last question, you decide what conditions to add to someone else's rep. Personally, I feel that people should add to others rep often until we all get use to using it. Your reasons are quite valid too, but in practice I'm sure groups of people have "love fests" where they add rep to everyone in their group. There's a mechanism in place to prevent this, because if you try to add to someone else's rep too often it won't take it.

ps - I got two more grey reps in the last few days. If folks don't mind, leave your name in the comment of the rep form because I'm not sure if grey rep comes from getting multiple reps from the same person.

Thanks Plo,

I did as you said and.......Lo! I got some comments. The interesting thing is I got two rep points today within minutes of each other.
Thanks for yours (plus another annoymous one from another thread).

It never occured to me to put my name in as I assumed it identified the sender, but I will in future.
As I said, I'm still quite new to all this, but learning. Actually, I feel so posative about modern technology now I think I'll go and programme the video, or perhaps not, probably it's best left to my kids!

Nick

[pam]

If I recall, every starts with a rep of 10 - don't ask me why.
Pam

[polo_pro]

I'm not sure how such large discrepancies between various SC member's rep points occured. Maybe admins stepped in and jacked them up? Maybe people abused it early on when it was just introduced (and since then protections have been put in place that result in grey rep points). Honestly, I really don't care how this ended up happening.

But what I did notice is watching my rep change over time has shown me a disturbing trend. Anyone with an extremely large number of rep points ends up contributing substantially more rep points to others than someone with less. So if you have less than 100 (which accounts for 99% of the members of SC members) rep points, when you give rep points to someone else, then their rep points only increase by 1 or so. But if you have an obscenely large number of rep points, when you give rep points to someone else, then their rep points jump by 10 or more.

At the moment less than 20 people have over 100 rep points. So until this small group of people start giving rep points, the overall rep point system isn't going to work well at all. Giving rep points will be limited to 1 (or 0 in the case of grey) rep ponts having little afffect even if we get 90% of the SC members using this feature. One solution is to bring the rep points of everyone more inline with each other rather than having a few outliers "hording" them (most likely inadvertantly).

In conclusion, I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to blame anyone. I see this more as a situation that just "developed" over time. My main reason for continuing to focus on this topic is that I think this feature could be quite useful to the overall community. It just needs to be tuned and managed a bit more...and a certain amount of education so people are more comfortable using it.

[falves]

Steve,

This is such a small, tight-knit, community that I don't even think that we really need rep points. For those of us who come here a lot and read most posts, if not all, I think that we can pretty much figure out who is "reputable" and who is not -- and I mean that in the context of this site, not in life at large! :)

I happen to think that all the regulars here are reputable and demonstrate unique insight and perspective in their posts. Newbies have my "benefit of the doubt" until proven otherwise. I think that's pretty much it...

What do you guys and gals think?

-Fernando

[bystander]

Here's some interesting default info about halfway down this page:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=154551

Don't know if this board's settings are still at default, but it could explain a few things.

That vbulletin forum site is an interesting place if one is interested in figuring out what goes on behind the scenes.

[bystander]

Steve,

I happen to think that all the regulars here are reputable and demonstrate unique insight and perspective in their posts. Newbies have my "benefit of the doubt" until proven otherwise. I think that's pretty much it...

What do you guys and gals think?

-FernandoI generally agree with you, the content of the posts is more important then a number.

However, a well run forum doesn't run by itself. What you don't always see is the moderators and administrators work of weeding out spam, keeping posters from flaming each other, and organizing things.

The rep system is just a tool to keep track of things. It can be used to help the moderators in their task.

Since the chat here started in a different message board format, then was ported to vbulletin, and vbulletin was already a mature application with many add-ons and features, things haven't quite settled out yet.

Some of the features like members not being able to send rep points seem strange here, but not in the hundreds of vbulletin message boards in the past where users would "game the system" to escalate each other's points to gain access to special features. Since we don't have too many "special features" here, a prohibition on concentrating rep points seems unneeded, but since it is a default setting, and the board seems to work, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies.

It may not be up to the users alone to decide whether the rep system seems fair. I think the decision rests with whoever funds a site and employs moderators and administrators to keep it running smoothly.

As non-paying users, we may have a say, (after all, the site organizer appreciates our attendance and time spent here), but we may not have the final say.

On the other hand, the recent interest in the "segchat awards" has proven that posters here don't particularly put much stock in the rep points system as it presently exists. If they did, a moderator could just print out a sorted rep-point list and email the appropriate congratulations.

[falves]

I'm not suggesting we do away with rep points, I'm sure they have their purpose for some. I'm just saying that for me, I'd rather rely on people's posts and personalities, as I perceive them, than on a consensus point system.

Carry on... :)

-Fernando

[Desert_Seg]

I too think that Steve (and maybe others) are placing too much emphasis on the rep point system and I, for one, don't really look at at the little green boxes.

Steven

[nickyboy]

I'm not sure how such large discrepancies between various SC member's rep points occured. Maybe admins stepped in and jacked them up? Maybe people abused it early on when it was just introduced (and since then protections have been put in place that result in grey rep points). Honestly, I really don't care how this ended up happening.

But what I did notice is watching my rep change over time has shown me a disturbing trend. Anyone with an extremely large number of rep points ends up contributing substantially more rep points to others than someone with less. So if you have less than 100 (which accounts for 99% of the members of SC members) rep points, when you give rep points to someone else, then their rep points only increase by 1 or so. But if you have an obscenely large number of rep points, when you give rep points to someone else, then their rep points jump by 10 or more.

At the moment less than 20 people have over 100 rep points. So until this small group of people start giving rep points, the overall rep point system isn't going to work well at all. Giving rep points will be limited to 1 (or 0 in the case of grey) rep ponts having little afffect even if we get 90% of the SC members using this feature. One solution is to bring the rep points of everyone more inline with each other rather than having a few outliers "hording" them (most likely inadvertantly).

In conclusion, I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to blame anyone. I see this more as a situation that just "developed" over time. My main reason for continuing to focus on this topic is that I think this feature could be quite useful to the overall community. It just needs to be tuned and managed a bit more...and a certain amount of education so people are more comfortable using it.

Ahh, that would explain why I recieved 3 points from two rep submissions, if you see what I mean.

Nick

[pam]

I agree with Steve and Falves <G>. Rep points are fun, but on the whole, what matters is the day to day posts - what they contribute to the forum and to the forum members. Someone could have lots of rep points and go bonkers or suddenly turn negative because of a single experience combined with other stressors that are going on in their life which have pushed them over the edge, and then the rep points are - misleading.
Pam

I too think that Steve (and maybe others) are placing too much emphasis on the rep point system and I, for one, don't really look at at the little green boxes.

Steven