Karma

Why suddenly showing up on the board and criticizing people?

I wasn't critising anyone. Just don't understand the whole karma thing. don't mean to offend

Don't worry conniebee, Interplanetjanet's bark is far worse than her bite (ain't that right IPJ?).

I just had another look at the Karma Log Files, and they just get funnier... watch out for those attempting to give Karma to themselves, and then logging in as guests and attempting the same. Oh! and thanks for the -5 karma for critising the karma scheme oldie. I've figured out who you are by keeping a tab (it is just so predicta-fuckin'-ble) - nice try

woof.

how is this possible to check?

See the top of the page.

Xtra --> karma ratings --> log file

Stoppit IPJ! I just burst out loud in the office and now everybody is looking at me

meow?

Thanks janet

I tried and failed...

There should be no limit to the amount of positive karma you can give!!!

why aren't i on the karma list when i aint opted out?

They got me too... oh its so unfair!!!

Not been a member for long enough/not posted enough or something...

Well, looking at the karma list, if you just post just one more time you'll earn the right to give karma.

Not enough posts?

May be because




Edit: geez, five simultaneaous posts at 4:51 PM

Hello Anon1

[img]http://www.keithball.net/img/smileys/wave.gif[/img]

well that old schooler (at the moment called "Anon15") has now pinged me with minus 20 karma points today. Looks like we have some really "mature" older members. Just shows what a joke this system is when one member can give two-thirds of a person's karmic balance in one day,

Join the revolution Taffy - The more the merrier - Grab a pitchfork and let's go.

Join the comrades OG.

Edit: once again Sin said it before I did.

Let's lynch Editor Bob!

Hang 'im I say...

...oh wait!

He hasn't got a neck

I'm just shocked that you felt the need to include the word "motorbike" in that sentence. Most unlike you dahlink.

PS I've been in SAS training all afternoon (unfortunately the IT crap and not the "shooting and blowing folk up" kind) so no karma from me to anyone. Natch.

Ooooo BEHAVE!

Yeah, lets do the shoe size thing! I got 48s.

Be interested to know who's zapping OG -20 in one day is a lot of bad karma to be sending out. Peace and love guys, peace and love...

Karma system is a joke.

Opt out. Am I now a communist? Not by the looks of my car.

Send me -ive now, you freaks.

What makes you think it's the same person? I see 3x -5 for OG and 1x +5, that makes -10 not -20.

But true, if anything this "feature" is likely to cause squabble, so I say ditch it.

The more people opt out, the sooner it will go.

I am more concerened about being banned from the system for abusing it to be honest. I was contemplating setting up some kind of karma pyramid scheme.

aplogies, one of the pings didn't work because they had already given karma to me. From the log the same person (currently anon19) sent me 5 -ve Karma points at:

16:17
10:09
08:57 (which didn't count)
08:55

Suggested purpose:

To provide a fully-automated system whereby:

1) readers of the forum have the opportunity to mark-out posts as being of good quality.

2) the current highest quality posts and topics are listed on some page somewhere for people who are only interested in reading the quality stuff, not wading through all the lesser quality stuff. Perhaps this "page somewhere" might be the TT frontpage.

Suggested implementation:

- Rating interface:

Just one button on each post. Button is labelled "+quality". Clicking this button marks the post as being of high quality. "High quality" means whatever the person voting wants it to mean. That could be the post is useful, interesting, funny, or charming. One vote per post per IP address. All votes carry equal weight - guests and members.

- Results interface (by post):

Four pages. One is a list of current high quality topics from the "pertinent" forum categories. The second is a list of current high quality individual posts from pertinent categories. The other two results pages are the topic and post results from non-pertinent categories. Pertinent categories are "News, Life in, Going out, Sport, and Themes". Non-pertinent are "Meetups, and Misc". Classifieds not included at all. Either the topics or posts page from pertinent categories is a candidate for the TT front page - most casual readers of TT come here for the Munich-related local information updates. There are substantially more casual readers than active forum members, perhaps even 10x.

- Results interface (by member):

One page to showing a list of members ranked by quality. Perhaps quality hits/total-posts to show a quality/non-quality ration. Or don't go down the whole "member ranking" route again?

- Logging interface:

Provide a public log of who voted which post, or not? Anonymise the voters or not? Advantages of an open log: makes the system transparent, allays accusations of vote rigging. Disadavantages: many people prefer to vote anonymously and wouldn't vote at all if they knew their actions were being tracked. Maybe those logged in anonymously are anonymised, otherwise not? Guests are always anonymous, or publish their IP?

Unanswered question:

Those who don't like the current member-based karma rating system have already made their opinions clear. Will the quieter majority miss the current system if it is ditched?

2nd alternative:

Keep the karma as it is. Those who like it can play with it. Those that don't can opt out and keep quiet. Add a 100% post-based only system in addition. Or perhaps two buttons per post: +karma, +quality. Karma is member based. Quality is post based.

Alternatives? Suggestions?

why do we actually have to have such a system at all? Is it because some people are too lazy to read the threads and want others to filter the good ones out for them?

Sorry, what i find interesting or pertinent might not be the same as somebody else. I, for one, would prefer to make my own judgements as to whether i find a thread or post interesting.

We don't have to have it. It's an added feature that might add value to the site. If it becomes clear that there is no workable system for TT, it can be dropped altogether. Currently the whole thing is experimental.

And as to the question of being lazy - it's not about that. It's about not having the time, or not being willing to make time, to read everything.

Yes, you would be providing a free service by filtering out the good topics for others to read. But you don't have to take part, it is voluntary.

I like the idea of being able to choose whether you want to be anonymous or not.

Sounds good Ed Bob. I think it could be useful having per member ratings stored somewhere, but they arent a factor in any calculations are they so it probably wont be necesary. I would think, after the karma experience, that having an actual list of per persons rating wouldnt be so useful and would probably turn it back into a popularity contest.

A log of which posts get which rating is fine but it should probably be anonymous in case anyones feelings get hurt. I probably wouldnt be so keen on rating posts if I thought people might get pissed off at me for it. If I want to piss people off I will simply post

But publish the code, that should get rid of any vote rigging allegations. There shouldnt be anything in the code of this new system that needs hiding is there?

Yes such a system is useful, and better than the current system. We wont need both, if you adopt the new system we can throw karma out the window.

Oh and the new system shouldnt be opt out, after all even guests can vote, which is an ok idea, but dont base it on IP address otherwise the same guest can vote multiple times. Actually, I cant think of a way to prevent guests from doing this so better make it only logged in users can vote.

I definitly think this would be a great feature. Theres too many posts to keep up with these days and I always end up missing good ones.

However one point. "Quality" is too subjective. I like posts with a tone, or funny ones, or controversial or offensive ones. To me, low quality means boring, too serious, or spelling swearwords with *s.

To someone else Quality could mean something else. How about having multiple measures. Instead of Quality, we could have Funny, Helpful, Clever, Interesting etc...

And absolutly include misc and random chat this time. Such a system makes a lot more sense for that category than the others.

The best thing about the karma system is the hilariously funny thread bitching about it. If you were to change it, one of the best non-sense threads would dissappear.
The only way that I would use it were if it listed who thought the entire thread was "interesting" or not. I might then look at a thread first that was rated positive by some and yet negative by others and vice versa. Outside of that, those that would actually use such a function should decide on the details. I do think however that voting individual posts +/- is screaming for abuse. There are other ratings that actually seem to be more reliable as they themselves didn't lend themselves to abuse for whatever reason. Those would be the ones that IW pointed to in his shameless "Karma for sale" pitch.

for a flagging system to work you would need more than one category of flag. that way people can filter according to what is important to them, otherwise you will get some people flagging for funny/entertaining others for informative etc and the mixture produces something useless for filtering.

What? Scrap the whole current system while I'm starting to provide a challenge for Yeti?


But then the cool car topic couldn't get voted on.

But seriously, I do think that the system might work if there is only one choice - positive. I don't know if I'd say scrap the whole karma system - that can still be played with by regular forum members - but the quality routine could be beneficial, as you said, for people who aren't regular members (sorry to say this, but kinda like craigslist's "best of"). Just my 2c.

Off the top of my head, I'd say drop the system. I don't think you have enough readers/voters to get a scale that would balance out very subjective voting to a mostly common baseline (like Slashdot has). But I don't read your stats, maybe you do have that many visitors.

GL

C'mon guys. We can't scrap it just yet. I've managed to make it all the way up to -18...from -87!!! Let me at least run positive first...

32 pages moaning about karma. Well done Comrades. We have scored a remarkable victory that in years to come will be looked back upon by our Fascist rulers as a turning point in the history of Karma. Vive la revolution.

I agree with IPJ and I'm not embarassed to say so.

Positive only.

Kissy, kissy Tim!

Comrade Jimbo Jimbeamovitch, please step into the back of this Zil, the Party secretary wishes to, ahem, speak with you.

My opinions:

Drop or keep karma, doesn't matter to me.

If rating for posts rather than members I would rather see posts rated rather than threads. Sometimes a thread starts out really well and then descends into madness. Or vice versa, it starts out as nonsense and ends up being a valuable contribution. It would be a pity if it was missed either way due to early rating of the thread rather than of the posts.

I would tend to have a very different rating system from Kza's. I think that posts that provide useful information about Munich/Germany/the world (in that order of importance) are rated high. If I just want to rate funny or offensive posts, there are thousands of places on the Internet I can do that. I don't have to get it from Toytown. I do appreciate a lot of the wit that goes on here, it's just sometimes too much to sort the wheat from the chaff. If the website is to remain useful to newcomers to Munich that is.

Hey, stop spreading commie rumors Comrade Bigfoot. I never said that I wanted to, ahem, speak with Jimbo. Jeez, even the commie ranks are revolting.

You can say that again.

Ba-Doom-Tshhhh!!

I think that the purpose needs to be pretty well-defined in order to make something like this work. I opted out of Karma simply because I thought it was boring. It is a popularity contest and there seems to be no real result from acquiring bad-karma (unlike in real life - clearly if I had lived a better life last time around I would have better things to do than post this long-winded reply).

To be honest, I would be surprised if the overhead of integrating a system like that written from scratch into the Invision board code would be a worthwhile effort for you. This is, somehow, a business for you and you should think about it in those terms.

I can think of a very good reason for you, qua Business Bob, to implement such a system. You want to attract advertisers. 2 things attract advertising dollars to this site:

1) a thriving community - part of the freewheeling nature of the site is what makes it so dynamic and vital.

2) a community that advertisers will not be afraid to associate their name with - this is where a system to control post quality is useful.

You have to tread a fine line in not destroying the community while still controlling the content.

Slashdot has an interesting system with a lot of levels. Users have Karma - allowing the community to slap down trolls. This karma is taken into account in a filtering system. Users with low karma automatically have their comments filtered. Additionally there is a level of filtering that is handled by the editors who pre-approve new topics (as you haven't got the capital to justify employing those folks - I guess , but could be you're sitting on a goldmine or something) you would have to rely on volunteers (subscribers would be a good place to look for starters).

I would suggest something like the following:

1. Keep karma, but apply it to users only and automatically hide posts from users below a certain threshold. allow other users to set this threshold so they can choose to see all or nothing.

2. make the separation between miscellaneous garbage posts and informational posts more distinct - this means really weeding out crap from the Life in X topics and making them stickier. One of my only gripes is that I inteface the site from rss or view new posts almost exclusively - I miss some great informational topics as they disappear from these sources pretty quickly under the massive background noise of misc & random chat.

3. add "was this post useful to you" button and auto-move highly-rated stuff into the wiki (which is a great and underutilized feature of the site - this could really be used to drive traffic to the site as it should be indexed pretty well by the various robots).

4. Do away with the posts on the front-page. I never visit the front-page anymore as it contains no information that I can't get in the forum. A return to features would be nice, imho.

5. Make subscription support more interesting. I guess if there were value-added content that was available as subscription (for instance - negotiated discounts with advertisers for subscribers) it would be more tempting.

I know you didn't ask for a commentary on how to run the site generally, but I had two cents laying around so I figured I'd just go ahead and give them away.

At any rate, you do good work and it is appreciated. Despite the bitching.

I. Slim

I say keep everything the way it is but with one change--give the comrades power to give karma. We do not care for our karma, we do not want to be in the list but we wouldn't mind giving a genuine -ve or +ve to those who care about it.

Now roots, you wouldn't really want to go and make it perfect now would you?