New Karma System (Theory)

[Highway of Life]

Yeah, I know... but I'm just wondering if it would be worth my time to worry about that abuse...

[Freelance]

If you want a system that shows "real" information, it should be abuse-free.
Otherwise it doesn't mather if it is abuse-free.

IMO one should not be able to abuse such a system. Otherwise I wouldn't even think about building such a system.

[Prince of area51]

Thanks

I will... I'm working on it right now, I'm just wondering now, if it's a big deal if I put in abuse checks...
What gain would someone have for abusing it, I wonder...

I really don't know how this option can be amused because once the button is clicked, it disappears. So, one member can only mark a thread nice once.

[Highway of Life]

That's not really the purpose of the system... it's not to mark topics themselves, but responses by members.
At least how I see a simple implementation of it.

Let me see if I can give an example, say you ask for support in the support forums, and someone replies...
If the post was really helpful, you might press the [ Thanks ] button for the user for his help in answering your question.
This would add an additional karma point or just "thanks" point.
It really doesn't serve a huge purpose, except that it would increase the rep points of the users who were especially helpful in providing solutions, or just post helpful or insightful posts.
It's kinda like post count... what does it do, except to show how much the member is using the boards.
Whereas karma points would show how much a member is helping other members on the board.
Nothing fancy, just really basic.

Of course, there could easily be an advanced version of this, which I posted about some pages ago, but I'm not thinking of doing anything to that scale.

[Freelance]

I don't know if thats what you mean but, I think a good idea would be that only the topicstarter, usely the one in need of help, can give a [Thanks] point. And like Prince said, once the point is given, the button dissapears for the whole topic.

[Nicholas the Italian]

And like Prince said, once the point is given, the button dissapears for the whole topic.

You may have more than one post with useful replies.

[Klors]

That's not really the purpose of the system... it's not to mark topics themselves, but responses by members.
At least how I see a simple implementation of it.

Let me see if I can give an example, say you ask for support in the support forums, and someone replies...
If the post was really helpful, you might press the [ Thanks ] button for the user for his help in answering your question.
This would add an additional karma point or just "thanks" point.
It really doesn't serve a huge purpose, except that it would increase the rep points of the users who were especially helpful in providing solutions, or just post help....

Sounds somewhat like the system at http://www.experts-exchange.com which is obviously suited to certain types of forum.

On the subject of abuse, there will always be people who try to abuse these kind of systems no matter what type of implementation. They'll do it just because it's there.

The only way to combat that is to make it so that their actions can only affect their own experience of the board.

I've thought many times about possible karma systems since the area51 board's implementation was removed and came up with a few ideas that I may try and create as a mod once the rc1 becomes available. No doubt I'll never get anywhere with it, but it'll give me something to keep me occupied.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

One comment I've heard a lot is that people tend to give more negative karma than positive karma, thus unbalancing the system.

That's easy to fix.

Assign a point value to each (positive or negative), with positive being worth more. Then set a cron (with the tasks system in phpBB3) to calculate how many times positive karma has been given vs. negative karma, and then adjust the point value of each globally so that the body of positives has the same total number of points as the body of negatives.

Anybody who has a greater proportion of negative than the average (rather than the absolute) will have the "bad karma" icon displayed by their name.

That compensates for the whole "people comment more on things they disagree with" problem.

[Highway of Life]

Although many sites have the positive/negative karma options, I'm eliminating the negative side completely. We are just going to do plus points.

Also, it really wouldn't benefit the users to abuse the system anyways, it's just a nice display of "helpfulness" count, like I said, it would be like post count, do we really need post count? technically, no... all it does is show how often someone posts on the board, it's a nice display, and that's how I'm going to implement the THANKS system. Just a nice display.
For example, Nightrider would have a very high "THANKS" count.

[wingnut144]

Although many sites have the positive/negative karma options, I'm eliminating the negative side completely. We are just going to do plus points.

In my opinion (which I'm sure doesn't carry much weight!! ), it would be best to have an 'average' of both positive/negative, or give more points to the positive than to the negative, but to calculate them both in the overall Karma total.

I would imagine that it would be easy enough to check if a person has given feedback on a particular post/message/user, and not allow that same user to keep giving either positive or negative karma points for the same post, etc.