One of the admin functions I have available to me is to be able to view ALL reputation actions, including comments. I can filter by date range, or by who the comments were "from" or "to". This can be useful to determine if someone is abusing the system and take appropriate steps. This will be especially pertinent if I decide to re-enable negative rep.
Anyway, here is a screen shot from the beginning of the year 2005.
And this one is from the beginning of this year.
Notice the enormous difference in the rep power numbers.
BTW, I can also control some options of the reputation system by member group. These options are:
- Can See Who Left User Ratings - Yes or No
- Can Use Reputation - Yes or No
- Can Hide Reputation from Others - Yes or No
- Can Leave Negative Reputation - Yes or No
So I may change those options as well while I am tinkering with the system.
Maybe it would be best if the rep points were completely anonymous? Or only visible to Contributor level members?
Maybe negative rep could be limited to Contributor level members only with the caveat that abusing the system will get you banned and you lose your Contributor membership?
Anyway, I've alerted my programmer about zeroing out the rep system, but I want to give this more time so more people might notice the announcement I put up about this impending change.
Bear in mind that nothing will be cast in stone about this, and I might change anything that doesn't appear to be working as I had hoped. Except recovering the zeroed out figures, of course. That is being done at the database level so once they are zeroed, they are GONE.
Oh, btw, I do appreciate the feedback about this, but I do hope that everyone realizes that I can't possibly implement everyone's suggestions, especially where there are directly contrary opinions about many of the options. My choosing something other than what YOU wish doesn't mean I didn't weigh in your opinion. It just means I decided that other criteria just carried more weight in my deliberations about this. And yes, I might be wrong about my decisions. If that proves to be the case, well, I'll just have to try to fix it. All of my pencils have erasers on them too.