I’m ok with this. I liked Aelle’s previous post, especially the point on rewarding people based on behaviours rather than opinions. There is one drawback I can see though. We can setup standards for why and how to use rep, but unless there is some form of moderation or enforcement, people will mostly likely just use it the way they want to. And so, if we want a ‘serious’ system, we are going to have to devote more moderator time in order to reinforce the standards of that system. If someone reported James’ behaviour (if they haven’t already) as misuse of the rep system, mods would actually have to investigate the claim in order to decide whether a warning ought to be given. That might seem easy (or not?) using this example, but what about more nuanced examples where it is not as obvious? Should moderators being doing this for us? Should we as individuals try to reconcile our differences with other forums members ourselves? I.E I recently was in a thread where people were throwing accusations at each other, ‘You are rude!, ‘You are not listening! This is your fault! You derailed this thread!’. Some of us eventually reconciled our previous differences and attitudes towards the other in order to reach, what was in my mind, a half-satisfactory closure. If you invite users to rep other users for behaviour and also invite them to report for misuse, how much of the moderators time are we going to take up? On a large forum like this, it is a feasible thing to do?
I'd like to hear a mod's perspective on this.
