Can new feature be added to reps system?

[brad jones]

Moderators and admins have access to who posted ratings -- so they are not anonymous.

I can already tell you the 'revenge' factor is an issue. Even without names a few people have tried to peg others who they -thought- rated them negatively. Best to leave it as it is.

Brad!

[RhinoBull]

So, I guess the subject is closed so I'm going to ask Martin to close this thread as well.

Thanks.

[wey97]

If I really cared that much about ratings I would think twice about posting to this thread but I feel (and others it seems too) that the system is not a good one. But maybe I just don't fully understand (or appreciate) how ratings work.

With time, these reputations will help the "star posters" rise and the people who only provide noise to become visible as well.

What good does this accomplish? If you frequent the forums enough, you have some idea of the "noise" posters so you can ignore them if you wish. This doesn't stop them from posting more and more noise. In fact, negative ratings may encourage posting more junk.

Star posters do deserve recognition...and again, frequent visitors know who these are. CornedBee springs to mind. I (and most of us) have gotten more help from him that we can remember and he's never asked for any recognition -- but he's gotten it. Perhaps that's a good example of how the system SHOULD work. Then you have the 'Please rate my post' in some sigs and I'm not condemning that because sometimes new members may not remember to rate or understand what the rating system is. But again, what good does it do to know that someone has a 50+ or 100+ reputation? You don't get to go to a specific member to ask a question unless you PM them. So you may encourage more PM-ing than actual forum participation. And what about a member that has, say 50+ and 50- reputations? Would it look like they just had a < 10 reputation as a member without any feedback? They may have 50 legitimate ratings and 50 bad ones. Does that mean they deserve less help than anyone else?

You should be able to see who left you feedback. The benefits of that would outweigh the negative outcome. The worry of it is having a lot of negative posts go back and forth but members could be restricted from posting threads and reputation if they abuse it. It could be the same as Ebay - You see who left you a feedback and you have the right to respond to their comments...

And I like RhinoBull's idea of a button to thank or apologize.

Just my two cents.

[RhinoBull]

At last somebody's on my side. I am blown away ...

[penagate]

I know this isn't completely on the topic at hand, but I think it would be useful for everyone to be able to see the rates/comments made on each post, rather than just the poster. So if you click Rate This Post, then it should show all the ratings made so far in that window.

And, as wey97 said, if you have say +20 and -15 rep points then it looks like you are a newbie because you are left where you started with 5 points. Maybe in the little caption over the ratings icons it should say the count of the member's positive and negative ratings.