what happened to the karma?

[Super-Mario]

i can't find it in the demo board at phpbbhacks.com

[Martin Blank]

A brief search would have found that it has been removed. The devs could find no really smooth way of using it where someone who had reached the heights of karma infected with Teh Stupid hidden, and worse, someone who had been buried in negative karma could not really claw his way out.

They indicated that they remained open to suggestions on how to implement it, but if you have such, please use the feature tracker to make the suggestions.

[olger901]

I would say give the admin an option to allow an user to reset himself, since that would be simple to implent as a permission in the permission system, then when a user PMs the admin they are teasing him the admin can turn the option on for that user so he can rest his karma level to 0

[dhn]

No, the best way to do this is to have self-healing Karma, so that if you are below 0, it slowly increases day by day / post by post (relative to the overall forum activity) till you are at a neutral 0 again.

The developers scrapped it, as it would take to much time and resources to implent properly. It might return in the version after 2.2.

[battye]

Is Karma a rewards system?

[Martin Blank]

It's a rating system. Users would rate other users' posts, positive or negative, and that would affect the overall karma rating. Users could then set their viewing preferences so that they see only posts from users with a specific karma level. People with little time on their hands could only read posts from people with high karma, for example, and people more willing to indulge in others' antics could set their karma level lower.

There were worries also about it becoming a popularity contest, where an unpopular person (such as a person on a political forum with an opposing viewpoint) would get buried just because others disagreed with that person. It's a really hard thing to get right.

[Paul Grayson]

The community my site replaced had a similar feature, where each user could be rated out of five, although it wasn't used to limit the display of posts.

Most users just hated the system; luckily after a software upgrade the feature could be disabled and it was.

[olger901]

Well true, it can be handy in some ways, but for some people that feature is really annoying, and not liked, so if it would be implented I would also say that they would need to insert an option that allows you to enable or disable it.

[Ptirhiik_]

I think rating a topic is far better than rating a user, and this is not what was doing the karma system in the earlier snapshots. I still don't get the point of a rating standard users system.

[BartVB]

Well, if implemented properly it can motivate people to make grate posts I'm sort of planning on implementing the karma system on my board in some form. Just to see if/how it works. Can be interesting

So far my plans are:
- to mostly use postitive ratings to calculate the karma that's shown in ones profile
- to use XMLHttpRequest or something similar to enable rating without the need to submit/reload the page
- use negative ratings for a post mainly to alert modertors
- to rate topics

but IMO a karma system is something that you just need to play with a lot It's really hard to anticipate how your vistors are going to use it.