What's happening to the Rep Power?

I noticed tonight that my rep power dropped down to 30. I figured it was done as a way to counter reputation inflation. But then my rep power dropped down to 4. Is something going on?

I was wondering the same thing. I asked this question on another thread, so I will be watching both that one and this one if Rich explains or not.

http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/foru...ad.php?t=72444

From what I've read you get a negative if you do not post things that are useful or that break the rules. But why do you really care? It's just a number.

What Olivia is referring too, is that the rep system seems to have been changed. Instead of seeing a big number there is now a smaller one. I was at over 200 points next to my green bars, now I am at 6. I was not hit with any negative points.

To some this is an important part of being on Fauna, they see it as a lot of hard work and honesty to have built up their reputation here. Other see it as numbers and then there are some who fool around with the whole system giving rep points to each other to make themselves look good.

I made some changes in the reputation system concerning how the reputation power is calculated. The numbers were getting way too bloated to be meaningful, plus the way I previously had things set, a snowball effect was taking place that was getting out of hand. so I simply scaled things back. The change should have been proportional. In other words if three people had reputation powers of 100, 200, and 300, the weighting will be more like 10, 20, and 30.

Same for the total reputation points. The totals will be less, but the relative rating will be the same. The way things were headed, it was going to require 100 or better of those green squares for some members, and that was more then was realistic for the display area for each post.

I also made a change to try to reduce abuse that I have noted recently. Some people are acting as stalkers towards other members and bombarding them with negative points at every opportunity, even if the post itself is basically harmless. There may be warning points and suspension in store for those people, btw. So what I did was to limit anyone from giving more then two members ANY reputation points in a single day, and you must give points to 20 members before you are able to give ANY additional points to the same person. Hopefully this will help to limit the "tit for tat" reputation point trading that I have noted in some instances. Since you can only dole out two helpings of reputation points per day, I think people will be much more circumspect in how they allocate it's usage.

Sorry, but sometimes I just have to take stock of the way things are going and try to make accommodations for what is reasonable and prudent for this site.

Thank you for the explanation Rich. I, too, was curious about about the change.

I appreciate your allowing the site to continue and finding ways of coping with the human beings involved.

OH NO MY STATUS!!!!!

Rich,

Now that I have the joking aside. I would have been a little more creative with dealing with this. Like when bcfos was doing this a while back you blew him out of the water and made an example out of him. The reputation system has been being abused for quite some time though, not just recently. Now there are (were) a few taking it too far, be it giving negative points just for the sake of making that person rise in the negative ratings or giving positive points to remove one from the negative position they were in. Either way the system was being abused. (Not knowing if it is possible or just too damn hard to do), I would have undone what these people had done and in turn zeroed them out for a set amount of time. Set up a very short set of rules that if it was done a second time a fine/suspension would follow and a permanent zeroing out.

I think you have a good change, with lower numbers and the amount you can give in a day is a good idea, along with how many you have to give out before you can give to the same person again. This will deffinately slow down those who have abused the rep system.

4,40,400,4000 They all work for me.

WHOA....now we get "KARMA power"!?!?

I don't know exactly what it is..but I like the sound of it!