Karma System

+1 - I like this idea. The only reason I'm typing more is because I needed more than 5 characters. XD

Quote from Jacob

The last thread was derailed and locked, so I figured I'd make a dedicated thread for this. I vote the Clickteam fora adopt a post based Karma system that has user's upvotes shown publically and their downvotes shown only to mods and admins. Private downvotes will help to alert the mods or admins of troll posts and users, while public upvotes will reflect the amount of constructive content a user provides to the community. This would also allow for a 'top threads' tab on the forum that can give permanent recognition of outstanding articles, help threads, or community examples. Constructive threads would no longer be so quickly buried under a sea of generic requests and posts.

+1
I had a very similar suggestion in the last thread, but this one is even better.
Negative karma only visssible to mods and Possitive sown publicly, very good idea

Although i dont think such a system is nessesary, it might very well contibute in a possitive way and help the Comunity and Clikteam.

I don't understand how such a big deal was made out of something that's not really a considerable problem.

There's really no reason to make downvotes only visible to mods, seeing as all voting would just be an anonymous +1 or -1. Then the post gets a net score. So you're saying if a bunch of people don't like a post, it would just show 0 to everyone but mods? That seems pretty pointless. If a post gets negative votes, anyone should be able to see so they know to avoid it.
Regardless of whether it is visible or not, people can still give petty downvotes. What's best is to do it like any other site and have the public thumbs up or thumbs down, or +1 or -1, and everyone sees the net score without knowing who voted.

Jacob I like your idea. Eliyahu, I agree though I'm sure some people will get upset and bent out of shape if they see a post of theirs getting a bunch of down votes. I know some people have done that at digg.com. I think most of us would be mature about it though. Personally, if you guys don't like my posts, that's fine lol. Vote away!

I really like the idea of a "top posts" feature though so good responses get more notice. Though if it's about pointless topics then it probably wouldn't be useful.

Another possibility could be not showing the actual number of up/down votes, but if a post gets a lot of down votes it could hide it with a statement "users found this post as not helpful to the discussion" and you can click to expand the view and read the post if you want. I've seen that done numerous places (though they usually show the number of votes as well). Though that might possible hurt people's feelings worse than just the number of votes listed lol.

If a post is so bad that you don't think it should be on the forum, just report it. If mods agree, it will be removed. If not, it won't.

Or are you suggesting having the post, but hiding it by default, like YouTube does? As in, letting the user display it. You could also put in a setting "Hide all posts with ratings below X" so the user can decide.
Overall, it's still helpful to see the score of the post. I think I'm in favor of YouTube's system here.

And I agree with Shawn that the majority of users would be mature about negative scores.

Quote from Eliyahu

Or are you suggesting having the post, but hiding it by default, like YouTube does? As in, letting the user display it. You could also put in a setting "Hide all posts with ratings below X" so the user can decide.
Overall, it's still helpful to see the score of the post. I think I'm in favor of YouTube's system here.

Yeah that's what I'm referring to. So it wouldn't be removed, but basically automatically hide stuff that everybody voted down and didn't contribute to anything. A lot of places do that, amazon reviews, I think that's how digg comments work too. And gamespot.

Obviously the posts that truly should be removed because of content/offensiveness would be moderated, but otherwise the system would be able to clean itself up based on user consensus. And the posts would still be there if people wanted to read it, they'd just have to click on it to show it.

That system does bring up an issue with the current posting system though... systems that hide down voted posts usually are threaded replies (not always though). In otherwords, the comments responding to the down voted post would be hidden along with it. Our bulletin board doesn't work that way so what you'd end up having is replies to hidden posts. Every post is treated as a reply to the original poster as opposed to being threaded to the comment you're actually replying to.

If posts get ratings, mods could then look at a list of the most negatively-rated posts, and take further action. It'd be a good indicator of where problems are occuring. I imagine this would be nice for moderators.

It would be a lot easier to determine trends this way, than the random email I get occasionally reporting a post. No way I can remember all the users names that come up without like, writing them down every time and that's just silly.

A hidden negative 'karma' total per user could definitely give us some insight of potential problems.

Again I say though, I see noreal evidence that anything meaningful would be achieved by such measures... there really doesn't seem to be a problem here to me, most people are on the whole helpful, friendly and respect each other and things just generally get along nicely. I can't get my head around why so many people think there's a need for this...

I agree with you, but Jacob's thread is about the karma system. It doesn't necessarily have to solve anything, but it could be useful.
I think it'd be cool to have.

I think Reddit has a similar system, but it doesn't fit too well for flat forums where all replies go to the end of a thread instead of to specific people. I remember the old forum have a choice between Flat and Threaded, the latter being appropriate for Reddit-style system. Unfortunately I don't see this forum supporting threaded mode, so it would only make sense for the first post to be votable.

Something to note: Some of the forums here already support rating threads by giving X/5 stars - how would this play in?

I think part of Jacob's intent was to have something that was interesting/fun and potentially useful, as opposed to trying to solve a big spam problem (which I don't think we really have). I think a hidden vote system is fine, but you really do still need to have down votes whether the votes are visible to regular forum users or not. Let's say I get a good karma rating for posting helpful stuff, but then later on for whatever reason my posting goes down hill and I start posting rude or pointless stuff. If there's no negative voting feature then my karma rating stays high as if I were a valuable member even though I'm actually making things worse. There needs to be a way to reflect your actual posting and that would require being able to be down voted.

I see this as just an interesting statistic and not trying to actually solve a problem really. Potentially useful, if not no harm. Plus as has been mentioned you could have posts featured as the best answers to a question which would be nice I think.

Quote from Jacob

This is completely unrelated to the other thread, save for that it was mentioned there. There isn't a large spam problem, but it would be nice to have a way to see and recognise exceptional posts among the regular crop.

Yeah I figured that's what you are aiming for. I really do like that idea.

I think Possitive and Negative Karma shuld be seperate.
I think such a Karma system has 2 main functions.

FUNCTION A: DIAGNOSTIC TOOL FOR MODERATORS
- By being able to view a User Bad Karma list, moderators can better identify and deal with problematic posting/ Posters

FUNCTION B: IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM FOR GOOD/ USEFULL POSTS
- By being able to view Threads sorted by the highest Good Karma rating, Users can more easily find usefull/ helpfull articles and threads

...
I dont see any good reasons to have negative karma on display at all.
Im not saying Neative Karma is useless, im just saying Publically displaying Negative Karma does not help anything and can only cause irritation, discrimination and troubble.
Even if Negative Karma is not on display, it still serves its purpose as data for the diagnstic tool.
Possitive karma would be a motivator for Users to do good, and thats a reason to have it on public display.
Negative Karma on the other hand, does not do any good by being displayed publically, and has the opposite effect of bringing poeple closer together.

True, but if negative karma were hidden from the public, no one would really use it. Negative karma in that situation is the exact same thing as the "Report Post" button we already have, but I presume is not often used.

How about displaying Possitive Karma along side the Post profile info, but have Negative Karma only display when viewing a User Profile.
That way your wont be imediatly judge all the time when posting, but it will still be a valid and available piece of information if someone wants to investigate you.

Wait, so, Karma will be on the user's level and not on the post's level?