Temp Poll: Stop post count and membership ranks from being displayed

[Bhootamadmin]

Hi, I feel that the karma system replicates what the rank system does but does it in a better way. Removing these options will also make the display section less cluttered and give us room for more stuff. I really dont give a shit who has posted how many times, which is the way that the "newbie/jr member/member" system and the post count display works.

[Wylair]

We could also customize those rank names as well

[Therm]

Take AWAY another way for me to obtain seniority by talking the most?

Wat?

[Peeks]

Take AWAY another way for me to obtain seniority by talking the most?

Wat?

In all fairness Therm, if no one is listening.......

[Veith]

Personally, I think I'd like this to be as close as possible to the ED forums we know and love. I don't want others to feel less significant because they don't have a thousand posts, because for some people, 900 of those posts could be stupid. (me lol) With the karma system, a post count seems redundant.

Same thing with the membership ranks. It's already a pain in the ass for newcomers to assimilate into our... unique community, and having a majority of the posters at a higher rank than them would probably be discouraging. In the grand scheme, people should view a post based on its contents, not on how important the poster is.

edit: syntax~

[Sianl]

Personally, I think I'd like this to be as close as possible to the ED forums we know and love. I don't want others to feel less significant because they don't have a thousand posts, because for some people, 900 of those posts could be stupid. (me lol) With the karma system, a post count seems redundant.

Same thing with the membership ranks. It's already a pain in the ass for newcomers to assimilate into our... unique community, and having a majority of the posters at a higher rank than them would probably be discouraging. In the grand scheme, people should view a post based on its contents, not on how important the poster is.

edit: syntax~

The Blizzard forums aren't THAT amazing TBQH.

Sianl

[Hanif]

I think we can get rid of

1) The star display thing.   I don't even know that it's about.
2) The ranking thing.
3) Karma.
4) Methods of contact.
5) Post count.

I think name, guild, faction, custom title is plenty.

[Bhootam]

I think we can get rid of

1) The star display thing.   I don't even know that it's about.
2) The ranking thing.
3) Karma.
4) Methods of contact.
5) Post count.

I think name, guild, faction, custom title is plenty.

I agree with the star display thing and the ranking thing and even the post count actually. Karma, i'm ambivalent towards, i think this could work out well. And the link to PM should be there.

[Sianl]

The stars are representation of your rank based on post count. I believe you call them: pips

You can set the threshold of them to represent lets say "500 posts". It is definitely redundant when you have a post counter. Mod's and admins usually get the maxed out rank regardless of the number of posts, so that is why you as a mod already have the full 100%.

Well, if this all goes according to my speculation.

Sianl

[Hanif]

Oh, is that the only way to send PMs to someone?  Yeah, keep that, then.

[Kangy]

Oh, is that the only way to send PMs to someone?  Yeah, keep that, then.

No, there's still the option on someone's profile, but this is a shorter way to get to it.

[Garhuul]

Karma, i'm ambivalent towards, i think this could work out well.

Karma/Rep systems CAN work well, but like anonymous reporting on the old forums they have amazing potential to be abused. We introduced a Rep system on an older, Zetaboards-based Star Wars RP forum I was on at one point and it quickly became a system to rep-bomb someone down into the negatives. In a community of something of a hundred people, I believe the best-repped member was sitting at +35 where our worst had -86 or so. I don't necessarily see the same thing happening here, but it's just a feature that's very easy to abuse.

That being said, I would go one way or the other with the post count/member rank issue: either have a visible post count, or specific "ranks" for post counts. I'd personally go with the titles, give 'em a fun Warcraft theme (though I would just stop posting if it meant having the title "Peon" under my name forever and ever), and go on with my day.

Pips are dumb, though. Always and forever.

[Hanif]

Does the rep count for anything?

Any forum I've seen with a karma thing it's just been there, rather than anyone paying any attention to it.

[Akyle]

Personally, I think I'd like this to be as close as possible to the ED forums we know and love. I don't want others to feel less significant because they don't have a thousand posts, because for some people, 900 of those posts could be stupid. (me lol) With the karma system, a post count seems redundant.

Same thing with the membership ranks. It's already a pain in the ass for newcomers to assimilate into our... unique community, and having a majority of the posters at a higher rank than them would probably be discouraging. In the grand scheme, people should view a post based on its contents, not on how important the poster is.

edit: syntax~

This. Having a post count might make people tempted to post quantity over quality as well.

[Garhuul]

Does the rep count for anything?

Any forum I've seen with a karma thing it's just been there, rather than anyone paying any attention to it.

By default, it shouldn't. I know on the old ZB we had it set up to give anyone who hit -75 Rep an automatic 2 day suspension, presumably because all of us on the Administration/Moderation team were too busy circle jerking in the Admin forums to care about the lowly peasants in lower boards. As you might expect, it did not end well.

[Bhootamadmin]

Karma, i'm ambivalent towards, i think this could work out well.

Karma/Rep systems CAN work well, but like anonymous reporting on the old forums they have amazing potential to be abused. We introduced a Rep system on an older, Zetaboards-based Star Wars RP forum I was on at one point and it quickly became a system to rep-bomb someone down into the negatives. In a community of something of a hundred people, I believe the best-repped member was sitting at +35 where our worst had -86 or so. I don't necessarily see the same thing happening here, but it's just a feature that's very easy to abuse.

Thanks for the heads up Valandre. Experience such as yours is really valuable. I've gone ahead and throttled the rep-bumping so how it works is that users can buff or debuff the karma of any one member only once every 30 days. This should put a fair dampner on any one no-life buffing his friends or debuffing his enemies by spamming the buff / debuff button every hour. As a result, I think that karma gains or losses will reflect broad consensus among the community. Enough to see what happens, I think.

Let's get more discussion on the post count and ranks system.

[Therm]

Admins and Moderators should retain the applicable titles.

For the newbs, that is.

[Takota Earthspear]

I agree that it currently is too cluttered, but I am not sure of the solution.  I agree that at least admins and mods should have titles, but it would be nice to have titles for others as well, again, Warcraft themed.  And you can adjust the post count number in relation to the titles, so for example, you could have:

5 posts - Peon
10 posts - Something better than Peon.

You don't have to have a huge number of posts.  Karma, I'm not so sure about.  It's not horrible, nor great, though it is nice to be able to give people Karma.  I'm not one to subtract Karma.

Overall, if this is community based, I'd let the poll sit for a bit and see what the community has to say.

[Aitana]

This. Having a post count might make people tempted to post quantity over quality as well.

I have seen this happen on other forums before. It lead to a lot of stupid posting because people wanted to increase their post count.

Karma ... It has always struck me as more of a popularity contest. What I have seen in the past is that people tended to use karma to up-rank their friends and down-rank people they didn't like regardless of the content of their posts. I haven't noticed the same phenomenon with up-ranking and down-ranking posts in places like WoW-head.

1) The star display thing.   
2) The ranking thing.
3) Karma.
4) Methods of contact.
5) Post count.

1) The admins can change what the star thing does. It can be linked to your rank on the forums much like the color of your post was on the old forums or it can be linked to post count, and it doesn't have to be stars. If it is used to designate admins and moderators, it might be useful. Otherwise I would rather get rid of it.
2) See above. I like ranking the posts. I prefer that over karma because it targets specific offensive posts, not a person.
3) See above. I'm ambivalent about karma.
4) Keep the methods of contact. I like easy access to that.
5) See above. It leads to too much pointless posting.

[Defenestrate]

Karma, i'm ambivalent towards, i think this could work out well.

Karma/Rep systems CAN work well, but like anonymous reporting on the old forums they have amazing potential to be abused. We introduced a Rep system on an older, Zetaboards-based Star Wars RP forum I was on at one point and it quickly became a system to rep-bomb someone down into the negatives. In a community of something of a hundred people, I believe the best-repped member was sitting at +35 where our worst had -86 or so. I don't necessarily see the same thing happening here, but it's just a feature that's very easy to abuse.

Thanks for the heads up Valandre. Experience such as yours is really valuable. I've gone ahead and throttled the rep-bumping so how it works is that users can buff or debuff the karma of any one member only once every 30 days. This should put a fair dampner on any one no-life buffing his friends or debuffing his enemies by spamming the buff / debuff button every hour. As a result, I think that karma gains or losses will reflect broad consensus among the community. Enough to see what happens, I think.

Let's get more discussion on the post count and ranks system.

30 days may be a bit long. Once a day may do the trick. Especially since it has no REAL bearing on anything (for now). Might be best to wait and see if it does indeed get abused.

As far as post count/ranks, I think they should be left as is. It's a good way to get new members of the forums to be active without any real incentive. It's also a good way to control trolls to some extent. Ranks can be given automatically based on post count. One idea is to put all new members into a "newbie" rank with limited post capabilities. Once they've proven they can post a few times without having to be moderated, could be automatically upgraded to full access? Also, mods can manually adjust post count, so if there IS a problem with someone's posts, it's easy to deal with.

That may be more than the mods are willing to deal with, but it's an idea.

[Woodwylde]

Leave it to a Hindi speaker to promote Karma.

If it is truly easily manipulated it is worthless as tool, though it would have been nice for newbs to know who the assholes were so they could take their comments with a grain of salt… then again, newbs being newbs they probably wouldn’t regardless.

The number of posts thing is meaningless. It only serves to promote quantity over quality in the weak minded and unthinking.

Ranks only promote elitism and short circuit thinking. The strength of one’s post should stand on its own.

My stars are nice because they are blue… but I could do with less clutter.

[Wylair]

1) The star display thing.   I don't even know that it's about.

It's about stupid. Admins: red 5, moderators: blue 5. I don't think we really need those and yeah we should figure out a way to unset that.

[Paythan]

No one knows me but I sort of ran the Emerald Dream Gazette a while ago. Just have some suggestions...

This one is a obviously too late since we're already posting here but VanillaForums.org has a much cleaner interface by default and I actually prefer it over SMF, and I've been a big SMF user in the past. It's very "web 2.0". It comes with a lot of really awesome user-based stuff out of the box like user profile blogs/statuses, etc. Penny Arcade is using it as their forum system now. And it's got some great user infraction/warning systems in place - for example: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/profile/infractions/8809/UncleSporky

And a few more:

• Get rid of the Karma system - easily abused and popularity contest problems or people just don't use it
• Leave the +Respect option with a 3-5 day cooldown
• Really push people to use the PER POST up/down voting - this is where the real strength of a community run forum comes from
• Get rid of the post counts - these days it doesn't really serve any purpose other than "look how much time I waste!"
• Lose the ranks - Again, for a general community forum they don't serve any real purpose other than to designate the mods/admins
• You will eventually need additional anti-spam measures for registration. recaptcha + some "are you human" or math questions, etc

This would be pretty time consuming, but if you REALLY wanted to avoid anonymous trolls like the WoW Forums have, do an in game verification with that person's character to verify it is actually them posting. There's no automated way of doing this that I've ever heard of, but with a team of mods you could possibly due it. In game mail would help immensely.

[Wylair]

Karma, i'm ambivalent towards, i think this could work out well.

Karma/Rep systems CAN work well, but like anonymous reporting on the old forums they have amazing potential to be abused.

Karma is anonymous. Rep is not, if we someone getting rep bombed, admins can look up who is rep bombing.

[Snieghlol]

The Blizzard forums aren't THAT amazing TBQH.

Sianl

i think he means more in terms of the official forums' familiarity