- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Achronos
I should note that Sketch and I have thought a lot about a Karma system for people in the public forums. What you guys have been described is more like a "community moderation" system, which I don't really think would be that effective here.
Rather, what we have been thinking about is a system which rewards you for good participation. For example, people with high karma could get access to a bigger set of avatars, some special titles, maybe a restricted forum (that everyone can see, but only high karma users can participate in). People with low karma would be more limited in how often they could post, and then eventually losing the ability to create new topics, only to reply. New users would start out at a mid-level of karma (not good, but not bad). This gives new users the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise.
Abuse would be prevented by the fact that karma would be mostly automatic. For the most part, karma would be gained and lost without user interaction/rating of posts. So, certain things make you a more "trusted" user: gamertag linking (you've paid for that privledge), posting topics/posts, founding an active chapter, having little to no history of moderator actions on your posts, etc. The only user component would be a feedback system. We could add something where people could rate posts, and this could slightly affect karma, as well as maybe affect sort order - or at least put an icon next to the thread indicating whether people think it is a good thread or not.
So, yeah, we have ideas. But we're looking at dealing with search first, and then we'll think more about it. What you guys can do now is talk about the above proposals and suggest modifications or concerns. Or maybe add to the list of rewards or things that modify karma. Please remember though - we're trying to go for positive reinforcement of good participation.
It sounds great --
Although, the potential is there for discrimination, and that'll always be a problem - not a prominent one, but still a threat waiting for a possible time to strike.
Then again, that's probably just me being stupid. I'll leave that judgement for others to make.