Mobile app version of vmapp.org
Login or Join
Connie744

: The concept of reputation and its effects on an online community Having recently introduced the concept of a '+rep' button to an online community I manage, I've noticed a couple of things. It

@Connie744

Posted in: #Community #CommunityManagement #Forum #Moderation #Reputation

Having recently introduced the concept of a '+rep' button to an online community I manage, I've noticed a couple of things. It functions as the thanks button does on vBulletin (user says 'thanks' to a poster, and the poster has a record of all the thanks they've given and received. There is a listing of who has thanked a person below a post).

Primarily it has become a way to add a voice to a discussion, without actually requiring the effort to type out a fully formed response. This brings the advantage of easily gauging popular opinions, and is a fun way of indicating good contributions to a thread.

However, is has also been detrimental, particularly during disagreements where people feel 'ganged up' on by a crowd of non-participants. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often, given the size of my community (70-100 actives), but there have still been requests to disable the feature.

I have a couple of questions.


What is the best way of keeping the concept of '+rep' or thanks without letting the mechanism be abused during personal disagreements between two members?
Are there any examples of such a system scaling well to larger communities? How was this achieved?

10.02% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Login to follow query

More posts by @Connie744

1 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

 

@Sarah324

I've ran several forum communities before and the downvote had to be ultimately removed. By keeping just upvote, you reward good quality posts while crappy posts get largely ignored.

Otherwise, as you said, personal vendettas or just the simple fact of having a couple of bored people with nothing to do at any given point in time leads to mass downvoting of all posts they can find...

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Back to top | Use Dark Theme