Reputation options & account merging behaving strangely

[Aramaech]

I recently had an issue where a member had created an alternate account with which to downvote another member they didn't like.
After finding out, I went into the alt's profile in the admin cp, and removed reputation given, and reputation received. 
This did not restore the original victims reputation for some reason.

Furthermore, when I then tried to merge the alt account with the owners original account, it got real weird. 
The alt disappeared as expected. But ANOTHER not aforementioned account was then credited with downvoting the original victim. 
In other words, the original account that issued the downvotes was gone, but the downvotes were not. Instead they were now showing as having been issued from yet another account.

This other mystery account appears (tho I can't be sure) to have the same name the alt account used to have before it's name was changed manually by the now ex-admin who created the alt. We think he created the alt. He may have just renamed an old abandoned account, it's tough to say. But by whatever means it came into existence, the alt, and the mystery account should've been the same account. 

 Wow.

Anyway, despite merging the alt, and the new mystery account both with the ex-admins account (and removing all rep given and received on both before doing so), the persons reputation was never restored. 

[Morrigan]

Submit a ticket. This will require that IPS have an actual look at what happened to fix it.

[Joel R]

Some thoughts:

1. When you remove or delete a profile, it doesn't adjust the reputation counts of content items.  You would need to rebuild reputation.  
2. As a general best practice for all communities, once you hit a certain size, you may want to totally remove downvote.  Or at the very least, to adjust the downvote reputation to be neutral (+0), so it doesn't actually reduce anyone's reputation.  Leaving downvote reputation is asking for users to show the ugly side of humanity.   

[Aramaech]

@Joel RYou know, that is an excellent suggestion. Thank you.

[Matt]

I definitely recommend disabling downvoting unless you have a very focused and trusting community.

 

[Pavel Chernitsky]

On 1/22/2021 at 3:49 AM, Joel R said:

As a general best practice for all communities, once you hit a certain size, you may want to totally remove downvote.  Or at the very least, to adjust the downvote reputation to be neutral (+0), so it doesn't actually reduce anyone's reputation.  Leaving downvote reputation is asking for users to show the ugly side of humanity.   

 

15 minutes ago, Matt said:

I definitely recommend disabling downvoting unless you have a very focused and trusting community.

Naaaa Downvoting is GREAT! 
We have it enabled in a fairly large (in our country's scale) community with around 16-20K content items being posted monthly.
When we enabled it, we opened a sticky thread warning people to use downvotes responsibly and only in cases where truly needed, like for "advice" that can cause injuries or monetary damage or for just boring, crappy, content. We've even called them that - "Bad Idea" and "Boring". 
Those were enabled together with positive and neutral reactions, three of each.

Our mods questioned the decision giving the same (solid) reasoning you guys did, but ultimately after having this system run for almost a year, negative reactions account for only 1.4% (Bad Idea) and 0.3% (Boring). Furthermore, after the initial buzz and some misuse, members who were doing it were issued PMs asking them to stop and explaining the importance of using the negative reactions wisely and sparingly, and explaining the implications of over-using downvotes can have on the community (those were very few members, and you can obviously Copy-Paste the PM). 

Eventually, the community rights itself and irons out the few and minor cases of downvote misuse. Users who deserve mostly high reputation get it despite the occasional downvote. It also works the other way around, for pointless babbling users who have a tendency to just waste everyone's time. And since there are very few of those, they "feel bad" and try to right their ways and get back on the community's good side. 

 

Those are my two cents.

P.S, there is another cent - you should try disabling all or at least all non-neutral reactions in a casual/offtopic/banter forum. Because from what we learned - they attract some of the most active members, both in term of posting and reacting. they tend to sort of break the "normal" scoring system because they get positive reputation without actually being "useful" to the regular community, and can appear to be more knowledgeable than they actually are.

[Joel R]

5 minutes ago, Pavel Chernitsky said:

P.S, there is another cent - you should try disabling all or at least all non-neutral reactions in a casual/offtopic/banter forum. Because from what we learned - they attract some of the most active members, both in term of posting and reacting. they tend to sort of break the "normal" scoring system because they get positive reputation without actually being "useful" to the regular community, and can appear to be more knowledgeable than they actually are.

Well, therein lies the problem.  

In vanilla IPS, you can't disable reps in certain boards.  So for the most active and passionate users in the most casual / offtopic forums, there is no way to stop downvoting or getting into a 'downvote war.'  This can and will happen eventually.  

As you pointed out, you need to manually interject and message the members.  This is not sustainable as you grow larger.   

[Pavel Chernitsky]

I was actually talking about the other way around - people getting to much positive reactions for thing not directly related to the community's "theme". For example, for us it's cars, but you can have a heated political discussion in the O/T, and one user who is like super-duper charismatic and eloquent, can get a few hundred of even thousand points they "don't deserve".

If that user then comes to the "pre-buy consultation" forum and advises someone that all american cars are trash - they might be taken seriously, even more so than someone who only got a few hundred rep-points, but did it by being useful and actually knowing things about cars. 

18 minutes ago, Joel R said:

As you pointed out, you need to manually interject and message the members.  This is not sustainable as you grow larger.   

As I said, this only happened a handful of times (I want to say less than five, but my memory is very meh) at the very first few weeks after enabling the reputation system so I blame it on not knowing how to properly use it. After sending out the PMs, as I mentioned - negative reactions take up only 1.7%. 

21 minutes ago, Joel R said:

In vanilla IPS, you can't disable reps in certain boards.

I think I saw a plugin/app for that. 

 

Lastly, people are dumb. Some more than others, some more frequently and some more intensely. Sometimes, they need to be told that.  Everyone is stupid at least once in a while, and if you don't know you're being stupid, you don't know to not repeat it. 

 

*ALSO! Ignore every single word I wrote in this thread if the average age of the members in you community is - or is close to - teens/20's. Those are the worst 😂