Rep System gone.

[nintai83]

I say au revoir rep system. I will not miss you either.

Thanks to the staff for removing it.

 

I think empowering authors to moderate their own comments is an excellent idea.

[RitualBlack]

I kind of liked the rep system. Once in a while you would find a high rated comment which may have explained why a mod may not be working (load orders, conflicts...that sort of thing), though people often got carried away with the thumbs down brigade.

[Cathair]

Using ratings a means to find good tech support posts never really worked anyway; at a glance, there was no telling whether the high-rated comment you were about to read was something useful, or just a paragraph of inane gushing. What did tell you something definitive was when other comments referenced a good post, as in, "@NexusUser: Wow, thanks for the fix, it works great!". People still can and will post comments like that. And come to think of it, is it really so much of a hassle to just skim the comments using your own judgement? I can't think of a single time when positive rep lead me to a good post that I would've missed on my own.

 

So, nothing has really changed on that front. What has changed is that ordinary users can no longer anonymously browbeat each other over petty differences of opinion, which was vastly more common than any "trolling" I ever saw. Allowing positive ratings wouldn't do a thing to stop such behavior, it would only make it worse. I'm just imagining what some of the ridiculous fanboy wars I've seen would look like if each side could only up-rep: any useful and genuinely well-intentioned comments would be dwarfed by the ratings given to people simply sniping at each other.

 

All in all, nothing of value has been lost.

 

Nobody needs to be able to delete comments, either. If a post is truly offensive and worthless enough that it shouldn't be part of a discussion, then the existing report function takes care of that just fine. That's what it's for. Anyone who claims to need more control than that over the speech of others is really just asking for their own echo chamber, the sort of thing that no worthwhile discussion forum should ever allow. Posters making demands for such features are just outing themselves as petty tyrants.

[elatio]

Nobody needs to be able to delete comments, either. If a post is truly offensive and worthless enough that it shouldn't be part of a discussion, then the existing report function takes care of that just fine. That's what it's for. Anyone who claims to need more control than that over the speech of others is really just asking for their own echo chamber, the sort of thing that no worthwhile discussion forum should ever allow. Posters making demands for such features are just outing themselves as petty tyrants.

This is also true, when shifting power from user concensus to the author's own judgement, the potential for abuse is arguably greater.

[blove]

Tyrant? Righteous much? "no worthwhile discussion forum should ever allow". Yes. Exactly.

 

How about something somewhere in between anarchy and involving the secret police in our daily posts?

[Arthmoor]

Nobody needs to be able to delete comments, either. If a post is truly offensive and worthless enough that it shouldn't be part of a discussion, then the existing report function takes care of that just fine. That's what it's for. Anyone who claims to need more control than that over the speech of others is really just asking for their own echo chamber, the sort of thing that no worthwhile discussion forum should ever allow. Posters making demands for such features are just outing themselves as petty tyrants.

Or, you know, it could be a normal tool in the arsenal of authors to relieve some of the burden on moderators for posts that are still insane but not actually rule violations. Like one I wanted gone because the user was advising others to use a program that corrupts files. Unless advising the use of broken tools is a rules violation, I fail to see why I should have had to bring that to the moderators rather than just getting rid of it myself.

 

Fortunately the other person who did the very same thing in the very next post self-edited after I got annoyed by seeing exactly the same thing pop right back up. Otherwise that would have been two posts in short order I'd have had to bother someone else about to get rid of.

 

This doesn't make me a tyrant by a long shot. This makes me someone who is being proactive about weeding out bad advice that can damage someone's game. It has nothing to do with wanting an echo chamber. I can accomplish that by having the comment threads completely disabled. Which really isn't something we should have to consider as a serious option.