Talk:Forum rating points

From Pirates@Home

The use of "trickle" here may be confusing, since CPDN uses "trickle" to describe intermediate results and status sent back by a Workunit which continues to run. I use it to describe slowly adding back to a resource limit. This is how the Yale Computer Center set up accounts for grad students and faculty back when I was there. Grad students could have a maximum of $50 in their account, but if you had less then each night $3 was added, until you reached the maximum.

Perhaps I should use "recharge" instead of "trickle"?

--Wormholio 07:41, 26 April 2007 (EDT)

second thoughts

After having set this up, it's not clear to me that this helps prevent "minus attacks", at least not any more than existing protections. It's already the case that any one person can only rate a single post once. Now, they could rate down every post made by someone they dont' like, but they can't rate it down by more than -1. Giving them only a finite number of rating points to spend does prevent someone from just rating down everything (or everything by someone else), so I guess it's actually useful above and beyond the existing implementation.

--Wormholio 20:58, 27 April 2007 (EDT)

Alternative idea for Moderators and Admins

Even with the minus limitations that you have added here (which I do believe reduce the power of the dreaded 'minus attacks'), a very determined person could still bypass this by simply creating multiple BOINC accounts on any given project (i.e., 5 accounts = 5x minus points), as was demonstrated recently on the Predictor@Home project (though that account creation was not for the purpose of bypassing the forum rating system). Thus, I would propose that moderators/admins be given 'super' rating power rather than unlimited (or higher limit) rating capabilities. For example, if a group of users (which is also a common version of the 'minus attack') or a user with multiple accounts excessively applies the minus rating, moderators and admins under the default BOINC setup or with the additions described here would only be capable of correcting this by applying a single '+' of their own. A better way to prevent this abuse, and perhaps to ensure that valued comments remain visible to the entire community, would be to give greater value to the plus/minus ratings of moderators and/or admins (perhaps +5 and +10 respectively?).

--Scott Brown 9:30, 8 May 2007 (EDT)