When I first started on this forum and had 50 or 60 posts I saw some things that offended me, and I responded with a few snaps back that offended some other people, and hence got me a considerable number of rate downs. That brought my overall karma to like 2.3 or so. The problem with the current system is that every time you make a post, it is with your default karma. This doesn't make any sense. It is virtually impossible for people to right their wrongs. If I make 50 posts and end up with an overall karma of 2.3, and then make 40 more posts, only 10 of which get rated up, then 40 more posts with a score of 2.3 get factored into my rating. Why? because they were rated neither up nor down. If you were rated neither up nor down, then shouldn't you just be default?
My proposals is that when you are calculating one's overall karma, you simply not consider the rating of a post which was rated neither up nor down. Why should you in the first place? If nobody has anything to say about a particular post, why should the system?
The current system could even be changed to correct this in retrospect, undoing all the damage that the current calculation method has caused to people. You would make a script that does something like this:
Take a list of all posts from the user, sorted in ascending chronological order. Starting at the beginning and working towards the end, you do something like:
TotalPostKarma = PostKarma[0];
NumPostsConsidered = 1;
for (int j=1; j < TotalNumPosts; ++j)
{
//The following condition checks if any rating was applied
//to the n'th post, by comparing it's rating with the
//n-1'th post.
if (IndividualPostKarma[j] != IndividualPostKarma[j-1])
{
TotalPostKarma += IndividualPostKarma[j];
NumPostsConsidered++;
}
}
TotalPostKarma = TotalPostKarma / NumPostsConsidered;
Also notice this bug in that when I type after a pre block is closed the text is chopped at the end and does not get wrapped.see-see-see-see-see-see-see-see-see-see-see-see
I think this would give a beter overall indication of a users true karma, and not lock people into a life of low karma regardless of how good the future content they post is.
Edited, Fri May 6 15:29:54 2005 by divisortheory
