Reputation Activity Score

[Mick]

What up gamers,

Today we have a new, separate suggestion that I would like to bring up to the community.

Right now one of the main issues with reputation totals is that they are not reflective of a user’s actual reputability, so it has been a common suggestion for us to completely remove reputation totals. In my opinion, this is not an adequate solution, and instead, we should consider trying to change our current reputation totals into a number that takes many more factors into consideration. This number will be considered your ‘activity score’. It is worth noting that this number is never going to be able to be perfect and should not be used by itself. We heavily recommend users perform their own due diligence and always look through a person’s posts, reputation, and other parts of their profile to get a better idea of who you are dealing with.

What I would like to propose today is an idea that Kram and I have been considering and preparing for a while now, and it is for us to remove the current reputation totals to replace it with a new number called ‘Activity Score’. The activity score of a user is calculated using an algorithm that takes into account many aspects of their contribution to the site, both positive and negative. With this score, we would be keeping the exact method of calculation completely unknown, including most of the specific metrics and how they are weighted. Some metrics include feedback, posts, account age, as well as negative factors such as warning points. This system does consider banned and legacy reputation, but it simply contributes a relatively lower amount compared to feedback with proof. We will still add the ability to add proof to your legacy feedback to make it worth more and we highly encourage you to do so.

Although we will not be sharing specifics about how the system calculates scores, below are some scores to show how this change would influence a variety of users on our platform. Please note that these scores are not finalised and are only approximate for now until we can gauge community interest to see if this is an idea worth developing further.

Spoiler: User scores

Zyger: 298
Doge: 297
LonelyTree: 205
Asa: 202
Glove: 183
Chearful: 173
ThaMango: 165
Ivain: 156
Ghast: 129
Choo:129
User: 109
null: 90
Dann: 77
JayMC: 61
Rika: 41
2pac:-2

Along with this, we would still continue to grey out legacy and banned reputation, no longer accept reports on this feedback, add a notice about legacy reputation, and send out messages to all users with feedback they need to upload to migrate their legacy feedback.

This idea is pretty different to anything else we have considered in the past and I am unsure of what you all will think of this, so please provide your input below and I look forward to considering it all .

Thanks everyone,

 

[Mick]

Back about a year ago we introduced some pretty radical changes to the way that we handle reputation. We made all reputation left by banned members be marked as uncounted in your reputation totals and disabled the reporting functionality to reduce abuse and targeted. The changes that we made were certainly controversial at the time, but looking back I'm a firm believer that the changes we made back then were the best that we could have made.

Our reputation system is very far from being perfect in its current state, and we fully recognise that. Since it's introduction we've changed many policies and spent countless hours developing new custom systems, such as disputing feedback.

At the moment we aren't planning to do any more development for our site until we can migrate to XF2. We're also not going to be making any changes to our policies surrounding reputation. Our system is stable at the moment, and making a change now when we're going to be redeveloping everything shortly isn't beneficial. Perhaps once we move to XF2 and have fixed all the bugs that come with that and have more time for some new development and to consider the impact that instituting new policies will result in.

Until then, I'll move this to denied. Once we migrate to XF2 if you feel that this is still relevant please create a new suggestion thread and we can look into it once again. Thank you to everyone for your support and criticism of our systems, it is definitely the best way for us to improve.

Thank you,