Microcosm Feature Suggestions

Not sure yet.

There won't initially be an equivalent to the rep system here, but it's a weird system. I've always been unsure how it fits in. It's no good as a system to say whether a trader is good/bad, and it's no good as a system to indicate influential people, and it's no good as a messaging system, and it's no good as a chat system.

Until I figure out how it fits in, what the purpose of it is, I'm not creating it.

I want to get things right, to think about them from a fresh perspective... so with private messages it's about coming back to it and re-considering why they act like a broken form of email, how they could be better, more shareable (still private, but more as conversations where new people could be included), richer, more effective, easier to use. And those questions can only be answered by knowing why they need to exist, how much they're used, how people use them, etc.

I don't really know any of that about the rep system, and the use of such systems seem to vary greatly from site to site.

Some sites love those green pips, or the public karma score. Some make the comments public.

LFGSS is already a freak in that we hide most of it, including the scores, and treat it as a +1/-1 mechanism.

But for that, other forums have the concept of "thanks", where comments within a thread have names below them of those who thank the author of a given post, or in some cases those who names who think the post is a bad one.

Is our use of rep (our hacked version) not closer to that?

So should we take the rep and simply merge it with a publicly visible "People who think this post is good: sumo, Emyr" thing below a comment?

It's one of those really inconsistent things from forum to forum. And Microcosm needs to get it right, in a consistent way. We can't do that until we work out what the underlying essence of rep/karma is. We don't yet know that.