Bitcoin Forum

Please excuse me for being new, but I can't seem to find how ratings work.  I am just wondering because I seem to have acquired a negative somehow and can't find why?

Maybe it would help if you first learned to use search function or even better - common sense. Both topics discussing the very same issue are on the same Meta board you just posted the question.

https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7265.0 (https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7265.0)
https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7267.0 (https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7267.0)

I would also strongly encourage reading this thread:

https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7269.0 (https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7269.0)

Calm down a bit there, pipe-smoking cat.  A forum search for "how do ratings work?" or "what causes a negative rating?" doesn't show those threads; whereas now this thread will appear, so ericools has done future searchers a valuable service.  DBTN (don't bite the newbs)

To sum up the current situation, ericools, forum members with at least 250 posts can see a little plus and minus next to other user's names when they post.  If they "plus" or "minus" a user they must wait 240 hours (ten days) before doing so again.  So the "-2" just means that a couple of people have clicked the minus on you.  I wouldn't worry about it too much:  as you can see I have a couple minuses myself.  I suspect they are the result of forum users who aren't taking the +/- thing very seriously, and/or are hoping to reduce the significance of the minuses they themselves were given.  I've checked through your posts and you haven't done anything egregious.

The rating function is pretty new and experimental, so it might change in the future.  In the meantime I've given you a plus one for your polite and useful question.  Don't worry about the wide variety of personalities here--you'll get used to it.  It can be chaotic at times, but most users mean well.  Take mewantsbitcoins above--the common sense stab is a little harsh, but he also took the time to provide three helpful links that will lead you to more information on ratings, and on bitcoins in general.  So the gruff, pipe-smoking cat is, like most users, here to help you out!

I have also given you a positive one for being so curious and polite.

This is why the neg button is a bad idea.
No one will claim negatives and anyone claiming a positive looks like their fishing for a reciprocal rating.

just my .02 btc

Yeah me too. This is not constructive at all. So if you disagree with someone you can now vote them instead of going through the trouble of you know, actually discussing.

I have an idea about these rating systems.  How about instead of applying the ratings equally to everyone, the ratings are instead weight-adjusted to reflect your own ratings?  Kind of like how netflix tries to give you movie recommendations based off of your ratings.

The goal is that if you and I similarly rate people, then your ratings will have more weight from my point of view.  And the more we rate the same people differently, the less weight your ratings will affect how I perceive people.  In this way, goofy raters will not impact serious raters.  Similar raters' perceptions will be most affected by each other.

Whaddya think?


Edit:

Call it a "social network reputation system"

Thank you everyone for your explanations.  I assumed someone would point out a post somewhere about it.  I knew there had to be one, but none of the posts in meta seemed to me to indicate that they would contain this type of information.  My deepest apologies to any smoking felines who's day was ruined for me having not read them all anyway.felines

For the most part I have found people on this forum to pretty helpful and quick to comment.  It actually gives me some added confidence in the currency seeing everyone trying to help others to use it.

A thought for the rating, maybe a way to tag it to the post that was responsible for provoking it.  I would be a bit curious to see how I managed to offend someone so quickly..  Ya know so I might repeat the process later the next time I'm feeling a bit anti-social.

Yep, that's what I suggested as well.

If you don't know what post it is that provoked people into downvoting you then how the hell can you learn from it?

I suggest take less notice of rating system and help out where you can. It's just an experiment and will probably be changed in the future.
The only way I can see this working if we change it to "+/thanks" only. This way people won't be discouraged from posting or asking questions in fear of getting bad rating and those who are looking for authoritative answer will be able to identify people who really know what they are talking about.
Now it's just kindergarten with kids pointing fingers at each other

edit: increasing post count to 400 or so would probably also help

Negative ratings should subtract not count side by side...

+1  (if I could vote :) )

This is turning into a fricking childish bullying game.

I've heard a lot of great ideas about how to change the rating system, the only problem is I'm not sure how much functionality is built into that system on this board and I don't know how hard it would be to change it.  Anyway, I agree that it would be better if you could only give positive ratings, or if negative ratings only subtracted from your positive ones.  But like Vladmir says, you shouldn't pay too much attention to the minuses unless there is a great number of them.  I guess that's the benefit of having them, is that bad users can be definitely identified by huge negative ratings, whereas if only pluses were allowed you wouldn't know if someone was just not very controversial or if no one liked them (if they had a 0 rating).  Anyway, I do seem to recall Theymos (one of the moderators) showing a print screen of the rating system and it had the capability of displaying the net rating instead of both plus and minus.  I'll go see if I can find that and will edit this post with the link if I can.

Edit:  Yep, here it is:  http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7265.40 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7265.40).  As you can see the two options are "Enable Karma Positive/Negative" and "Enable Karma Total".  I'm not sure if the "total" option only allows positive ratings, or if it allows positive and negative but only displays the total.  My guess is the latter.

Go ahead, smite me you punks!  :-*

Great! Got -1. Keep them coming!
Let's see how low it will go  ;D