Ranking System?

[Colm OReilly]

Hey,

Just noticed that members appear to be ranked. At the moment most of us appear to be junior members or mods.

What's the point of that? I can see the intent that as the board grows, is someone's looking for advice they can see who's been around longer but that would be evident from the number of posts and join date.

Also, shouldn't you view the message as opposed to who is saying it?

Thoughts?
Colm

[Phil Newton]

It's a feature that's built into most forum software and enabled by default, so I'm guessing it was left on as part of the ready-fire-aim approach. I don't really pay much attention to it, but perhaps as the board grows it'll be changed / removed.

[Matt]

I've used it a couple times to tell people their posts were helpful. (You are talking about the old-style scale on the top right of each post, right?)

[tomjen]

Check under your username - it says junior member.

As for the original reason a ranking system was used for these boards - people like to know the standing/rank of other people (and to increase their own)

[Colm OReilly]

So a standing/ranking system that's based on the number of posts is beneficial how?

Matt, I've found most people on fora don't use that rating system you mentioned. Usually they just post something like ^good post^

Phil, thanks for your response. I thought it could be along the lines of ready, fire, aim.

Colm

[Andrew Russell]

The thing under the user name is the user's title. I believe this is based on the post count (this is certainly the norm). I'm a big advocate of turning it off - we'll see if Steve does or not later (there is, indeed, a good chance it's a ready-fire-aim use of the default setting).

The user's reputation is the green "pips" to the right (mouseover for a textual readout). It is something that is essentially set by community voting. You can use the scales icon (next to the permalink) above the post in order to give a vote to someone (either up or down). There's various rules behind how it is calculated, but suffice to say that single votes do not have much impact at all, so you won't see them moving much initially.

[Jan Krüger]

I think since this forum is a community of smart people, the ranks and the reputation system are neither useful nor harmful. Everyone here will likely figure out who is helpful and who isn't for themselves, high rank/reputation or not.

[TechnoGuyRob]

In my humble opinion, post count shouldn't be shown in posts. I have found that, oftentimes, in previous forums I have participated in, some users will unfortunately resort to posting tremedous quantities of posts that lack quality, in order to up themselves on the "number of posts" list and have a high "ranking"/"rating".

Then again, this is a forum for smart people, so hopefully that wouldn't be problematic.