EclipsePhase forum rep and account Factions

http://lesswrong.com/ uses something similar to a rep system. People, posts and comments have scores, and can get voted up or down. New posts do not show up on the top page unless they get enough points. Not 100% sure this engine can be moved to the EP forum system, but it is an interesting experiment.

My ISP provider sucks the big one. Any problems loading userbars is a hosting issue. Download the userbars you like and host them elsewhere if you can.

That being said I'm in the process of fixing the issue (ie a new ISP provider) in the future. Needless to say I still uphold a guaranteed 0% up time for my server .

Both the forums and myself thank you.

This doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me, you should be able to choose ONE faction/network, and then you get to assign that faction/network's rep. Someone who'd never even heard of Firewall wouldn't be able to hand out I-Rep. Maybe you get a set amount of Rep to give out per day, anymore costing you Rep yourself.

At least if we want to base it on the IC Rep systems. There's no reason we couldn't make up our own networks, with dev being able to hand out the fabled P-Rep! (For Posthuman)

Yeah, I'd tend to agree with Xahn - not because it makes sense, but because it's more fun. If say only the devs can give i-rep, I'm the only one giving c-rep, but five people are giving @-rep, it gives your rep scores different values. Someone with a high i-rep we know is touched by Jury, and that rocks.

Capping the amount you can give per day (or more likely, per month) just keeps things from getting silly.

Whichever way it is implemented, I think this is a terrific idea.

Did the forum admin say a word about this (I read and reread the thread) but I've might've missed it, or is this a wishful thinking discussion? (keeping my fingers crossed that it's not, because I like the idea!)

My idea of what each rep type should be for:

i-rep - Recognition by the PHS crew
r-rep - Educating other forum-goers with math/science. Arenamontanus would probably have a fairly high r-rep score.
f-rep - Fan-material rep. Rewarded for contributing original material, e.g. the user bars, char sheets, etc.
c/@-rep - Being a good forum citizen. Funny or eloquent, helping keep the peace, rescuing people from exurgent infection.

I doubt this would be an exclusive list, but I think it should be limited to on-forum activities, and if there is an underground criminal network here, I suspect it would have its own reputation network.

Most of these reputations are things I would see mostly just increasing, although down-ranking people who are generally disruptive would work for c/@. (Give negative r-rep for promoting bad math and science? Negative f-rep for a character sheet that burns your eyes?)

Behind the scenes, it would be nice if rather than just keeping a running total, it would track who gave the rep and when, with dumps of the table released occasionally for people to play with, to try finding a better algorithm for distilling all of the +s and -s into a single reputation score. E.g. give higher weighting to users who grant rep below average for their level of forum activity and more weight for rep from users with a higher rep (leading to a page-rank scheme), perhaps decrease weighting for cliques, watch for abusive behaviours in both directions (somebody up or down-ranking lots of posts by the same person in a short time-frame), and giving higher weight to more recent rep changes, as they're a greater reflection on the user's current behaviour.

I wouldn't expect the forum sysop to try implementing any of those rankings behind the scenes (it would probably be fiddly, and computationally quite expensive), but it would be neat to showcase the output of the algorithm.

Or someone could actually implement this offsite, and host it as dynamic user bars, sort of like the current user bars that everyone who is anyone has begun using.

(edit - seems pretty convenient, actually. Imagine the user bars, except that the server that hosts them has its own login. The user bar includes a little line of '@-rep 2 c-rep 5' and so on. You click on the user bar and you're taken offsite, where you logon, then click to add to the target's rep. The target's user bar is updated here, dynamically.)

Really? Because I would, and I think you would. I mean, the fact is, we have like 8 people on this forum who really actively post, and I have a nagging suspicion it's because at least 4 of us are crazy. It wouldn't be a regular thing, and if you've already saved your login information, it's just three clicks.

Plus, if the choice is 'mildly inconvenient' or 'not at all', well...

There are a couple of different ways to go about this, and I agree it is pretty cool as an idea. Right now there are two things that would hold this one up - first, I'd want to get sign off from the PHS guys to do this. Karma systems like this *can* backfire, so we want to make sure we have it right and we're prepared for it. And second, time constraints, I've a number of other things on my plate needing to get done for the site and this one is simply not as critical.

So please, keep hacking out ideas on how to g about this - the karma module linked above is not a bad idea, and we already have flag on the site as well. Though really - with this sort of thing - Userpoints may be where it's at. We're on Drupal 6 so keep that in mind as you hunt around for modules to suggest.

I'm not sure how you see probability being used in this.

Okay I do not know what languages are used for the site/forum build. But if it's php based I can right something up for reputation score that could implement into wordpress/buddypress/bbpress if it would be compatible. Doing a single reputation score would be relatively easy, but doind it separately for all factions is going to get complicated. I am willing to whip up a general basis for reputation ranking by post and it wouldn't take long, and if someone else is ambitious is to adapt that to factions they are welcome to do so.

That's good. Well, so long as I get a cue that my time will not go to waste I will get right on writing this.

I'm interested in seeing what you come up with but please note I'll hold you to Drupal standard for code. If you've not done Drupal before take a moment to swing by drupal.org and get familiar with it. I'm pretty sure you can do the vast majority of what needs doing with the Userpoints and probably the Rules modules - you'd just need to document the configuration.

Make that 2-3 wks to be on the safe side. I've had more experience with joomla than drupal. Coding needs to be done right and secure so I'm extending the time period a little bit so I can have extra time to check everything as thoroughly as possible.

Blasted... Now I got the "Code Monkey" song from Jonathan Coulton stuck in my head.

(something messed up and this was a duplicate of the last one - feel free to delete it)

The only favors available are between posters, and whether I give you a favor or not depends on a lot of factors. I'm more likely to give a favor to Ancient History than I am to you, just because AH has a high Shadowrun reputation. I doubt anyone will be giving favors away based on Rep scores any more than they would give it away based on post counts.