What I'd really like to see one day . . . some day . . . would be the ability of people to "applaud/smite" an individual post. The author of that post's "karma" or whatever you want to call it would be reflective of the overall quality of his or her posts.
Say Frank has 200 posts, he ticks off Joe. In Karma Joe and all his "buddies" could smite Frank every X hours until (under the old software) the negative karma maxed out at 256 or so. Not sure if the SMF version has an upper limit. This happened, we had to disable
karma as it became useless within a couple of weeks, everyone who was contentious was maxed out on both positive and negative.
With per post ratings, Joe could dig up every one of Frank's posts and smite it. In the thread display the rating would be displayed, perhaps something like Amazon's "6 out of 12 people found this review helpful" thing, or on a 1 to 5 stars thing. That's a lot more work
than just smiting someone every time the timer resets, not that there aren't people who do seem to have too much time on their hands.
So the total karma thing could be a ratio of unique applauds/smites of all his messages. If one guy goes and smites all his messages, it
shouldn't affect his overall karma as much as if he got 10 friends to help him. Even so it'll be 10 vs however many unique people liked his posts. If you want to make the math a bit more complex . . .
Frank manages to write 10 posts Joe likes, and 20 he doesn't. So Joe gives him 10 attaboys and 20 getouttaheres. Joe has a total of -0.5 toward's Frank's total "post karma". The individual posts of Franks that are horrible get tons of bad ratings, the people who come later see that post was junk and pay it no mind. The overall rating of Frank only moves a little and over time will hopefully be a more
accurate reflection of his posting habits.
Any thoughts on how workable this is?