Photo.net user reputation rating

I am fairly active on another forum (nothing to do with photography)

that has a user reputation rating for it's members. If you dispense

useful information (i.e., you are genuinely interested in helping

someone out) other people can add reputation points to your name.

It really helps you to know who is respected vs. the dummies that

have a gazillion posts but a very low reputation rating. Forum

users have the option of hiding their reputation rating. Members

can also only add to the reputation rating of 10 other members per

day.

 

As photo.net continues to grow, I guess it comes with the territory

that we see some pretty snide, sarcastic remarks from the same users

over and over again. Thank goodness other users jump in to deal

with this, and the moderators are on the ball. But I think we'd see

less sarcasm from some users if there was an indicator of how other

p.netters feel about the information they share.

 

Has this ever been discussed before?

Do you think there's a chance that mate rating, revenge rating etc may be repeated when rating reputations?

Mate rating and revenge rating are unavoidable when you have a rating sytem on a forum. However, since you can't take away from someone's reputation points, revenge rating would not be an issue.

And to the second guy that posted. Great job with the NFW comment. This is exactly what I'm talking about. At least step forward and post why you think it would or would not work.

I'm not very much into other forums, so pardon me for the banality of my following questions.

 

How would you indicate the snideness? By means of a specific 'negative' point or just by not attributing a 'merit' point?

 

The former case, which is the only viable in my opinion, is something I would not want to get involved with. As you said, we already have moderators. And then, I think I can be sarcastic as anybody else in return, were it called for. No need to leave 'bad marks'.

 

The latter instance is not viable. Surely there is some difference between people being actively snide toward each other and people simply posting pictures after they've paid for their subscription and not stepping on anyone's toes.

 

Last but not least: what happens once you go out of your way in order to help somebody and then you don't receive the reputation point you think you deserve?

>>Last but not least: what happens once you go out of your way in order to help somebody and then you don't receive the reputation point you think you deserve?<<

 

You whine. :-)

If you want to make the forums as problematical as the gallery, here's how to start.

Simple solution:

 

Give the moderators the abiliy to rate any given post as "plus" or "minus". Not all posts would get rated, but ones which were particuarly useful or particularly useless would get scored.

 

Use that as a basis for awarding "bronze", "sliver" and "gold" stars.

 

I don't think we'd want to hand out "negative" stars to idiots, but if you make as many useless, negative comments as you do useful, positive comments, the bad negates the good and you don't get a star!

 

This would replace the current "hero" icon, which is good, but which is somewhat flawed in that there's no real proceedure set up governing who gets one and there's a historical legacy attached to it.

 

The negative aspect of this is that it's a load of work for whoever has to do the programming (Brian) and the benefit to the site is questionable at best. Adding features that look good but don't actually do anything isn't a productive use of resources.

Sounds a lot like kindergarten. (Then again, so do most discussions about the ratings for images.)

Sometimes photo.net DOES seema lot like kindergarten.

 

People don't play fair, they steal each other's toys and they have tantrums when things don't go their way or others annoy them.

 

Maybe we need a nap time between 2 and 3pm when the site goes quiet and all you can do is look at the pictures...

Do we get cookies and a cup of Kool-Aid if we're really good during nap time? ; )

Probably not, but you could play scratchy piano music on the site during that time.

Well, frankly, it works very well on that forum with world wide users across many cultures. I'd venture to say the forum dwarfs photo.net in comparison, and there are about 16 million posts on there. All it does - and it does this well - is encourage other posters to be helpful and keep their attitudes in check.

 

If you don't like it, you just hide your reputation rating from other forum members in your account management screens.

 

Sarcasm is acceptable. I like delivering one or two sarcastic reponses when it's warranted. I don't mind seeing them or having people be mild idiots when they post in my threads. The idiot factor will never go away. It's the serious jerks out there that remind the rest of us that we need to strive to help others out.

 

No, a reputation rating system would not work unless it was the forum users giving reputation points to another user. No, there would be no capability to take a reputation point away from someone, only add to their reputation.

 

I would not want moderators to have to manage this -let users determine when to give a reputation point, if any at all. Most users tend not to bother with giving a point unless the advice they received was really hlepful.

 

Someone like Al Kaplan or Brooks might accumulate several thousand reputation points. Any newbie visiting photo.net might be encouraged to pay more attention to them than someone from the arctic who claims he shoots 200 Eskimo weddings a year.

 

It worked so well on that forum, and I thought it might be a good match for this one in some form or another. It also helps to build a more participatory community.

So let me try to understand better- someone who is popular and nearly right a couple of thousand times gets more rating points than someone who made a unique contribution a hundred times. Is that it? Sounds like a really good way to identify who's worth listening to. It looks like an attempt to drag mate-rating across from the gallery.

 

This idea falls flat because the people rating the advice probably don't have the knowledge to decide whats useful advice and what isn't along any dimension other than attitude. Its pretty silly to allow people who might have taken a counter-view (correctly or not) in a thread to vote on someone else's contribution. It's even dafter to give a vote to those who didn't have information or a viewpoint to contribute. Moderators to rate? Hmm. Some are very strong on their territory but frankly some aren't so knowledgeable that they could value others contributions usefully; and some have attitude that would possibly influence their rating of others.

 

This is a problem that doesn't need solving. Photo net is big enough to have people with expertise on most aspects of photography. If someone gives bad or inappropriate advice there's lots of people just waiting to jump in and correct them. That's all the protection that's needed. Why do some people feel the need to try and convert the subjective to the numerical and spoil it in the process?

In line with the Kindergarten theme, I'm suggesting to Brian that he include "Barney the Dinosaur" background music on all pages on the website...

 

Frankly I don't trust users to rate each other. They can't even rate each others images without cheating and getting into fights, complaining and retaliating for real or imagined slights.

 

I do trust moderators. Sure some are biased (we're all biased), but most of them can look past their biases if asked to do so. Not all are experts in their field, but they don't always need to be. They just need to recognize who is an expert, and that's usually not too hard to tell.

 

Maybe the "hero" system is fine. We just need to do a little work on it behind the scenes. It needs to be based on QUALITY and CONSISTANCY, not QUALITY of posting. Trouble is that some of the early "hero" icons were distributed on the basis of quanity of posting, and there are a few examples of "heros" who do NOT set a good example and who do not always give good, sound, reasoned advice. No names will be mentioned...

 

Perhaps we should scrap "Heros" and start agains with "Gurus" or silver and gold stars, so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. That would actually be pretty simple to do. Brian's call of course, not mine.

As I understand it, photo.net is based on the ArsDigita Community System, one feature of which was a system for measuring and tracking "<a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/member-value">member value</a>". Unlike a system like you describe where members generate one another's ratings, the "member value" feature is/was apparently generated internally by the system (whether by way of moderator intervention or not wasn't clear), measuring things like "members who are imposing a burden on the community (e.g., by posting off-topic questions in a discussion forum)". I sometimes wonder if the "member value" system is not still quietly humming away in photo.net's basement, kicking in occasionally to ban "high-maintenance" members or hand out hero icons to the angels. Hmmm.

As far as I know it's not, but it probably should be. I'm sure all the stats are in there (e.g. how often a moderator has to edit or remove posting from a user), but as far as I know that data isn't used.

 

There's also the potential facility for a moderator to rate a thread on an "interest" scale of 1-10, but it's not used either.

The member value system works by having moderators assess users with a charge for such things as posting something which the moderator feels compelled to delete. Most of our moderators never bother with this, and in fact, very few posts get deleted. One wouldn't be able to use the member value system as a surrogate for a reputation system.

 

As it turns out, at least on photo.net, the member value system isn't of great use. Most of the moderators know who the "costly" people are in their forums, and eventually they just ban them when they go too far.

PerlMonks (www.perlmonks.org) uses a reputation system derived from votes awarded to the posts that people make. Since the only group of online people more unruly and petty than photographers is geeks this gives me hope that there *are* systems that can work.

 

The way perlmonks works is as follows:

 

1. New accounts start off with the ability to post any question/response they care to. They get 10 votes per day and start off with zero reputation points.

 

2. If a user likes/hates your question or response they can use one of *their* votes to vote your question/response either up or down. Each up-vote gives you one reputation point. Each down-vote takes away one reputation point. You can only vote on a question/response once.

 

3. After you have received a total of 20 reputation points you are 'promoted' to the next level and can now cast 15 votes per day. The next level is 40 reputation (i.e. up-votes on things that you post to the site) away. The one after that is 80. And so on.

 

4. Each time that you are promoted you gain new privileges -- the ability to simply delete posts by others, your own home page, etc., etc.

 

This system is hardly foolproof, since a gang of people *could* up-vote each other repeatedly or down-vote someone else repeatedly. However, because I can also down-vote those people, you can bet that I will down-vote a "Wow. 7/7" comment and so undermine the usefulness of useless critiques (as I'm likely to lose more to the down-votes from irritated users than I am likely to gain up-votes from the person I've made friends with).

 

It also curtails the impact of robots since they can't participate in discussions at all. All in all, it's an interesting take since only by participating can I gain the up-votes that would eventually take me to point of being a forum moderator or someone with the potential to abuse the system by having lots of votes to throw around.

 

If there were some way of combining votes that can be cast on photos with votes that can be cast on other people's critiques then you encourage everyone to be more selective in what they vote on and how. Alternately, you could just keep the two things completely separate but use the critique-voting system as a way to cultivate and identify dedicated photo.net participants who are good candidates for becoming list moderators.

 

jon

I think perhaps a more fundemental question is not how you could implement a system, but why you would want to.

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It's usually pretty obvious when someone is stupid and/or offensive.

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The only reason I could really think of is for a system which automatically terminated a users account when it reached a certain negative level, but I don't think we really want robotic account termination.

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According to Brian we do have<em> a member value system (which) works by having moderators assess uses with a charge things as posting something which the moderator feels compelled to delete. Most of our moderators never bother with this</em>. I'm actually not aware of any current <em>option</em> to do this (though there may have been on ein the past). I'd assumed that "charges" are assesed automatically whenever a moderator has to edit or delete a user post or when a moderator feels compelled to suspend a user from posting in a forum for a while. I'd assumed that action itself incremented some sort of counter which was a measure of the amount of moderation effort any particular user required to be expended.

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I guess one value of such a system would be if the user concerned (and only the user concerned, not the public) could view his/her "negative score" and how close it was getting to the threshold for moderator action. That <em>might</em> discourage unacceptable behavior. On the other hand I guess it might encourage it if the users goal was to be disruptive. You can't tell with some people.

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The problem with users rating other users is pretty obvious based on experiences in the gallery section.

Hi. My two cents would be that I'm more in favor of adding robustness to the existing "interesting person" system. Right now, when I see that one of my interesting people has added something new to the site... it's a little too much trouble to find out exactly what that new thing is. My wishlist for a change in this regard would be to give us the ability to click on any interesting person and go to a page that contains only links to the new items (including the images that they've recently rated) since my last visit to that page. Just a thought... and I know that any change can be very easy to describe but difficult to code. This one requires a whole tracking system that isn't in place... a tracking system that stores the date and time of all of my visits to these "recent change" pages. Thanks for allowing me to at least input to the site... perchance to dream. :-)