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@Velocio
I get back from a day's running around and this thread makes no sense any more.
That and I nuked marcom's alias and then saw that he actually admitted it was his alias... won't bother running my scripts in future then, I'll just wait for the confession.
And no TS, I wasn't specifically singling you out except to try and reiterate something said before: that the only person successfully able to lobby for a ban to be lifted is the person who is banned. Anyone else getting involved just makes me think they're whinging in emails and don't have what it takes to man up and acknowledge their own behaviour. I did also figure though, that pointing out you were a particularly bad reference for others given your own posts might make you reflect on that. Apparently not.
And on the nergs. Rep is just karma. I turned it on originally just to see if it added anything positive to the community, largely it was rejected and it was disabled, but a few people felt that the commenting aspect was a nice addition. So it was left on, but all of the karma scores hidden... during which time the only possible use was to leave a +1 comment. Then there became a need to include a quantifiable measure in classifieds to show the wider community's view of particular sellers. At that point I re-enabled the ability to -1, but still hid the underlying complexity of a karma system (hint: it's not as simple as +1 and -1).
All good to this point, except then one of the unintended uses was nerging. Now I'm fine with the unintended use... in fact I personally believe that the unintended use of systems generally helps reveal new functionality that might be desired, or to shine a light on some other part of the functionality that isn't working well enough. But... the primary reason the scoring aspect of the commenting system is there is to help give some trust indicator within the Classifieds section.
To which we end up with the situation that on a number of occasions, some people really central to the community have had to ask me to fix their rep. Because they wanted to sell something but were basically nerged to hell by jokes.
And that is where the sheer volume of nerging affects the reason that the ability to nerg exists. And if we're saying that the reason to have it is wrong (that it shouldn't be used for Classifieds)... then I might as well remove the whole nerging thing. But if we're saying that it's kinda OK, but just not working efficiently... then I should be looking for some way to balance it out so that it retains some value for Classifieds whilst allowing nerging.
And really that means either encouraging more positive feedback, or limiting the sheer amount of nerging. And it's hard to change behaviour positively without some inducement (and I'm not sure what I could offer), but quite easy to deter people from the negative by subjecting themselves to some of that negativity. And I really don't want to include extra database queries (which is what a rate limiting system would need), so simply generating an inverse nerg weighted by the severity of the outgoing nerg (as I said, it's not just +1/-1)... seems a doable thing.
It's just an idea, to help keep the value re: Classifieds whilst not prohibiting or limiting your ability to nerg.