Poll Two: Reputation System

Ten people want rep gone but only 9 of them vote? Where's that last, lazy motherfucker at?

It was eleven if you count my statement about it. But I wasn't supporting this poll because I wanted it gone. I just thought the poll was a good idea. Perhaps somebody else also feels that way.

that's pretty much how i saw it. someone gangs up on you? find teammates to prop you up if you want to play the game, or ignore it if you don't really care and just use rep as a comment function. for the record, i like actormike and was more than willing to help prop him up, to the extent that i'd posrep whatever i saw of his. (i didn't quite have the giveafuck to hunt through old posts) no one ever said the nicest person was going to "win". i get almost exclusively posreps, but you can bet if i'd been the target of a rep war, i wouldn't have asked for the rules to be changed so i could still play.

You understand that the latter option was originally impossible, right?

You know how whenever somebody starts whining about the White Room, someone on staff always replies with "You mean you can't find enough porn on the Internet?"

In the same spirit, I'd have to ask: You mean you can't find enough games to play on the Internet without toying with actual people on a message board?

We understand that's Sokar's main reason for being here. Call me an optimist, but I sort of expect smart people to visit a discussion board to, yanno, discuss.

So b/c there are no people in the Red or Black it isn't a game anymore? There are still rankings, people still repwhore, still form repalliances, all that.

Only difference is now you can't remove the ability of others to 'play the game'. Was that really all that made it fun for you?

If we want it to be a game, then negative reps should have consequence, but I don't agree with the notion that once negative, you can't participate without pos repping rehab. I'd be less annoyed with such a game if the scores reset on a fixed schedule, like once a month, say.

But really, I come at this from the perspective of not wanting it to be a game at all. I want it to be a comment system, one that has the added feature of a quick thumbs up or thumbs down for when you don't have anything more meaningful to add.

Which was fixed long before we switched to NuRep. The most recent versions of old rep (back several years) had only the limitation that all rep by those in the red would show up as "disagrees" or (when it was working properly) "comments" and would not affect score.

This is all Ballsack's fault.

Become meaningless? Can I go to the store and buy something with those points? Can people other than the staff actually view the number of points I have*? It's a hidden total to everyone but me. So what sort of meaning does it have?

I don't really care what we do with rep. I got to enjoy the meltdown of it being taken away. That was fun. But I'm over that now. If the old system is restored I'm still going to use it the way I use it now. Just to sort of give props to good posts or put a quick comment in that isn't worth adding a post and I know will reach the intended person.

My only opinion on rep is that it gets discussed way too much for something that has no real world value.




*Ya you can sort of figure it out based on pips and scroll over comments but you can't pinpoint an exact amount unless you happen to give me a rep and then refresh the page and it has added a new pip. Even then you'll only know the total for a few moments because some other post I've made somewhere could have been repped.

yes, i can and do. i can play words with friends with strangers too, but it's funner to play with people you know.

speaking of which - who was it that started the scrabble game in the green room way back when? was that scorp? we should do that again!

i do that too. both the rep game and the discussion are entertaining to me.

maybe i'm reading too much into it and supposing a tone that isn't really there, but......i'm not trying to kill someone's dog or anything. yes, when you lose a game, that means you're all done playing. that's kind of how games work.


now it's basically a comment system. i still find it extremely useful and would like it to stay, but yeah....it's not really a game anymore, IMO.

I'm just not understanding how the ability to stop others from playing was all that made the game 'fun' for some people.

i guess we will just have to agree to disagree. the whole "everyone's a winner" mentality takes away the fun of any game, in my opinion. then again, i was the child who was known to throw a giant fit when an adult let me win at anything, so there ya go. at any rate, it appears you are in the majority and as long as you can comment and it's not ripped out completely, i'm ok with that, too.

I don't mind people winning or losing in a game. I take issue with a game that doesn't end, so once you've lost, you don't have a chance to give it another try. But again, for the most part, I simply don't care for it to be a game when there is a separate purpose that is harmed by the game.

So O2C has said we can't set it so it so that no points are assigned to "Agrees" or "Disagrees" because they can't both equal 0. Why not just set "Agrees" to the maximum value possible and "Disagrees" to the maximum negative value [-]minus 1[/-] and allow folks in the red to give rep? That would effectively retain reputation as a comment system and as a way of expressing agreement/disagreement.

Edit: it wouldn't have to be set to the maximum minus 1 because one would be a negative number.

Actually I think it would be pretty funny to set Agrees to 1,000,000 (IIRC that is the max.) And Disagrees to -1,000,000. So everyday we would see people swinging from completely red to completely green over and over again. You couldn't dog pile someone because 2 positives would still max out at 1,000,000 and 2 negatives would max out at -1,000,000. You would either have full green, the black neutral 0, or full red. I'd just be kind of fun to watch people shifting back and forth like that.

To fuck it up further, the pips could be set to the same color for either condition.

Or new colors that we're not told the meaning of.

Or just set them both to be transparent and invisible.

Or strobing rainbow colors! We need to do that for Christmas, at the very least.

OK. Here's my stab at it: Rep was a fun toy the way guns are fun toys. But guns have a deeper purpose too. If push comes to shove, it is nice to be able to do more than just push.

There are dick posters on this--and every board. And Rule Lawyers. And ineffective moderators. If there was a poster that was doing things that were shitty, but technically legal and the moderators couldn't--or wouldn't--do anything, you could negrep them and it had an effect. If said poster was enough of a dick, you could get together a "posse" and negrep in an organized manner, eventually driving them into the red. Of course if there weren't enough people who cared about your "cause" or the poster in question was liked by enough other members of the board, your negreps wouldn't have any measurable effect--Indeed, some people, a negrep campaign would have the net effect of increasing their rep when people would "block" for them.

Without functioning negrep all a person can do is go running to the mods. And if the mods aren't interested you're SOL.

I mean, it is interesting, because if you look at how it breaks down, the people who lobbied for Rep Classic tend to be libertarians who take care of themselves and don't want or need The Man, interfering in their affairs. The people who wanted rep castrated are inevitably Nanny Statists who want someone else to fight their battles for them--and want to take away everyone else's right to fight their own battles.

There. Wasn't nearly as eloquent as I wanted it to be, but that is the essence of my argument.

And with rep, all you can do is mildly annoy or even amuse the sadistic sonofabitch that the mods are ignoring.

At most, a couple of them would crack just enough to start a repwhine thread or two, but it wasn't because of the rep, it was because of the abuse they got. It's not the stupid red pips, it's the things you tell people and how you troll back, and you can do that without rep.

Incorrect. The max is either 2^32 or (2^31)-1, I forget which. The minimum is -(2^32) or -(2^31). Approximately 4.2 or 2.1 billion, respectively. 999,999 and up all have the same rollover text. And before you ask, no, we can't make every subsequent rep worth the next largest power of 2.

This reeks of Math in the Red Room....

Let's try Tex's way for a month, and then reset it back to old rep for another month, then rip it out altogether for the third month.

And those of us who have always wanted it gone must be anarchists?

You've missed my point. I want to watch them go from green to red back to green over and over again.

I've either explained what I want poorly or I don't understand the reason why it couldn't be implemented.

If you set the system to have the following, why wouldn't it work:
1. single posrep = 2,100,000,000
2. single negrep = -2,100,000,000 (or whatever the actual max is)
3. leave everyone at their exact current number of reps
4. implement the new system

Then I give you 2 posreps in a row. Wouldn't you have 2,100,000,000 points? If that is the max would you not just get to it and stop? So then if Gul came along and gave you 1 neg rep you would be at 0. And if Chad decided to negrep you again you would be at -2,100,000,000.

Forget all about scrollover comments. Who cares about them? I wrote most of them and I don't even care about them anymore. Only 3 would ever be displayed. Whichever the ones are for max rep, negmax rep, and zero.

It doesn't matter to me if we ever actually do this system. It'd be fun to watch for a little while I suppose but right now I'm really just curious about why it wouldn't work.

That sounds like it would work.

If someone were really ambitious and silly, here's a different way to get a lot of back and forth that amuses me in theory:

1) reset everybody's rep to 10

2) write a script that edits whatever file needs to be edited so that the weight of posrep is a random number between -R+1 and R+1 and the weight of negrep is a random number between -R-1 and R-1, where R is the value of the highest rep total for any poster. Average weights would be 1 and -1.

3) set things up so the script runs automatically whenever anyone makes a rep comment.

Well, yeah. There's that. Kinda wish I could agree with a comment right now.

Cool story bro!

But then there's how it was really used, which was to gang up on people with unpopular views.

Sort of like if the little red squares were pictures of the person and people were using them as avatars!

At least no one has gotten "avved" off the board yet.