Thanks very much for the recap and the details,
Flyertall!
Originally Posted by
Flyertall
Everyone starts with one good reputation bar. Every 100 likes adds another bar up until 5 bars, after which it takes 200 likes to earn subsequent bars, and perhaps 300 or 400 more likes to earn the final 10th bar, after which no more reputation bars can be earned, regardless of additional likes. Believe it or not, when one reviews the contributory content of users with the full 10 bars... those bars are for the most part well deserved
This is especially helpful because it describes an algorithm for a partially-safeguarded reputation mechanism. I suppose that the underlying idea is that those new to FT or new to a forum would pay more attention to posts by members with higher reputation scores.
I was hoping for a somewhat different mechanism that would be focused on posts and not posters. The idea being that a few posts in a thread are good information while many are questions, speculation, incorrect information, etc. Obviously this concept is only meaningful in a forum largely dedicated to providing information. It has no meaning in a social or conversational forum.
From my own experience in various platforms, I'm skeptical that a mechanism for per-poster reputation would be helpful to FT, but I have no objection if the TB wishes to implement it. It's possible that it would end up being a good thing.
Independently of a per-poster reputation mechanism, I urge the TB and IB to consider a per-post helpfulness score system. While no such mechanism could ever be foolproof or perfect, I believe it could be useful as a tool in managing and finding information buried within large threads.