Hello Folks,

As most of you know, the Karma System has been instrumental in reducing the amount of harassment via private messages by giving each of you the power to punish harassers, and by exposing serial harassers with a warning on their profile.

However, the Karma Score could also be used to differentiate "good" users, since knowing a user's total Karma Score could also give you an idea of how nice and respectful a user is. So rather than only letting you know when a user has severely negative Karma, I'm considering putting it all out there and letting everyone see everyone's Karma Score. We haven't done that up until now because if users knew their Karma Score, then they'd be able to game the system. To avoid that if we published everyone's Karma Score, we would have to limit the giving of Karma to users with verified pics and phones so that a user would not be able to create fake accounts to give their genuine accounts fake positive Karma, or someone they don't like fake negative Karma.

In this sense, the Karma System would work very similar to the eBay feedback system that gives more "distinction" and "trust" to veteran users who have accumulated lots of positive Karma. For example, a new user would always start with a Karma Score of 0, which would tell you very little about how nice and respectful they are, but a veteran user with a Karma Score of +50 would most likely be a very decent person, so you'd know they'd be worth getting to know. Therefore, all things being equal, a user with a higher Karma Score would get more attention, thus further incentivizing users to always be respectful while rewarding long-time users that are genuinely nice.

So what do you guys think? Is it worth opening up the Karma Scores at the cost of limiting the giving of Karma to fully verified users?

that works 4 me

@Andres: I would think that the way you have it set up now is best. I don't need to know if a profile has a Karma score of +50 or not, but be alerted to an User who has received many Bad Karma reports when I view their profile.

Great idea i am all for it, it would help to see who is respectful and nice and who is not !

I love the idea Andres! My contact restrictions dont allow non-verified people to contact me anyway.

Amazing, absolutely amazing. I love the sound of it. Another remarkable feature thank you Andres. I vote yes! :)

It's a great idea Admin BUT members have different reasons of giving negative or positive karma into different level of understanding and could be abused too to gain more positive karma ( by sending PM requests to friends they made here , asking for favor to give them positive karma )

I've been told I'm rude because I don't chat/ exchange messages privately to anyone I haven't seen participating on the forums after I sent them my FIRST RESPONSE & because I'm rude ( to their level of understanding ) possibly they'll give me negative karma ( just an assumption ) and because I could see my karma status , I get mad & I'll take revenge and give them negative karma too ( it now becomes a war of giving negative karma ) .

Well, I like the mysterious status of karma except for those who are super rude that needs to have a warning ...

This is a good point. If someone gave you negative Karma, you would instantly see your score drop and know who was responsible, and we might get a bunch of complaints like we did at the beginning when we used to notify users when they had received negative Karma. Perhaps what we could do to mitigate this is instead of showing you your exact score, we could show your score within a range (e.g. of 5). So, for example:

Total Karma 0 - 4: Karma Score of 0
Total Karma 5 - 9: Karma Score of 5
Total Karma 10 - 14: Karma Score of 10
Total Karma 15 - 19: Karma Score of 15
etc...

That way, you wouldn't see or notice most individual votes, since they would only impact your Karma Score at the limits of those ranges. For example, if you had Total Karma of 8, you would have a Karma Score of 5, and if someone gave you negative Karma and dropped your Total Karma to 7, you would still have a Karma Score of 5.

I'm thinking out loud here, but what do you guys think?

On the other hand, showing everyone their actual Total Karma might itself mitigate the effects of receiving negative Karma since -- assuming you had positive Total Karma -- you'd be able to see how little of an effect it actually had on your Total Karma. What I mean by that is, if you had a Total Karma of 27, and saw it drop to 26, would it really bother you that much knowing you still had a hugely positive Total Karma? Also, negative Karma wars are already minimized by default since you can only give a user Karma once (and that's assuming you've messaged them at any time).

There's some food for thought, but please discuss which solution you would prefer (ranged score vs. exact score) and why. Thanks!

Admin I got a Q

Could you monitored the karma system if it was abused or not ? What I mean was .. The PMs asking for favors ?

Think its a great idea.dont think it matters if it drops a point.but nice see good karma vs bad.good warning system and it saves time that could be wasted on someone not nice.