Ouch! I was playing with the settings to change the way the rep power is calculated and afterwards ran a routine that is supposed to recalculate that function based on the new settings. I think it did that, since the rep power for a few people I checked is REALLY low, but for some reason the karma (the admin section still calls it "reputation", so if I say that, it's really the renamed karma system I am talking about) level itself went through the roof.
I seriously doubt my programmer can "fix" it by figuring out all the positive and negative karma applied over the years, so I strongly suspect he's going to tell me all he can do is to clear those values completely. Which on one hand, I do hate for everyone to lose those karma points, but on the other hand, there are also a lot of people who got abused by that system over the years, that this may be the only way to correct those abuses.
I'll have to see what my programmer says, but don't be surprised if the karma system is a clean slate real soon. It will take about 24 hours for the ratings to change at the bottom of the forum main page, since that is only calculated once per 24 hours, and that just took place.
What I want to do when this is straightened out (sure, I don't have anything better to do right now.......
) is to weigh the karma power (in other words, how much power does a member have when they wish to give you positive or negative points) much more heavily on active participation rather than length of time as a member. So post count will weigh more heavily, and the amount of time being a member will mean much less.
I had hoped I could do some minor surgery in order to accompish this, but apparently not. I have NO idea why the actual karma point count went up so high for nearly everyone. What I tried to do shouldn't (famous last words) have done that..........
Oh well, guess we needed to have one big blow out during this upgrade.......
Now when the heck is someone going to write a spell check mod for this new version?
