Per post ratings, different Karma total idea ($40 bounty to write)

[JonM]

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?

[jl]

I've seen a web site (forgot the URL) that does this very nicely.  For each poster, there are two rows, the first row may be blank or up to 5 stemmed roses, the second row maybe blank or up to 5 broken eggs with yolk showing.

Suppose you like or agree with someone's post, you rate him/her with up to 5 roses.  If you dislike the post or disagree, you can rate him/her with up to 5 broken eggs.  The arithmetic is very simple. The averages of the roses are displayed, e.g. 3.5 stemmed roses.  The same is done with the broken eggs (implying eggs thrown at the poster). Each person can only vote once on each post not his own.  Most of the time, you either see roses or broken eggs.  Where you see both, this suggests a controversial issue with a substantil number of people taking opposite views.   The stemmed roses and broken eggs are shown in increments of 1/2 (rounded to the nearest half). Next to the row of roses or broken eggs are ratios in parenthesis.  E.g. with 4.5 roses and the statistics (4.62/105)  This means that the exact average was in fact 4.62 and that was the average of 105 people who gave roses.  If the row for broken eggs (with yolk showing) is not blank, there will also be a similar display.  E.g. 1.5 broken eggs with statistics (1.38/11) meaning that 11 people disliked the post and 'threw' some eggs which averaged to about 1.5 eggs (rounded to the nearest 0.5).  I like this feature much better than stars as done on hxxp:amazon.com [nonactive] and most other places.  While this feature (my 4th suggestion today) is not as important as the earlier three, I'm willing to pledge some matching dollars for its implementation, i.e. $20-$30.  Anyone interested in pledging matching donations for implementation of this feature?  Once this is implemented, ideally one should be able to search for highest postive (rose) ratings and negative (broken eggs) ratings.   The rows of roses or broken eggs should not take too much horizontal space and where applicable, are shown somewhere near and below the  handle/username of the poster.

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?

[JonM]

I'm willing to prime the pump with $20 as well.

I'm not as interested in displaying both positive and negative as a 1-5 scale, but that should be easily adaptable as the current karma display system is.  How do you feel on the overall rating display?