[pestaa]

Someone keeps lowering my karma, I don't even know the user who does that, not talking about the purpose.

In open source communities negative opinion is so destructive, that I'd recommend turning this feature completely off.

[disposable]

Don't know about turning it off.  Being able to see who gave you negative karma and/or for for the giver to state 'why' would be a good thing.  I wouldn't have any problems for people see my karma giving list.

[pestaa]

This forum software doesn't support exposing karma-givers, nor reasons to give.

Negative karma does demoralize.

[wei]

Interesting, may be we can add a view to list the karam givers and takers.

[pestaa]

That would solve the problem half. Negative karma still demoralizes everybody. It makes no sense to me.

[Ben]

If you want to have a karma feature at all, you need to accept that there might be people who also give you bad karma. I mean, isn't this the idea of a karma system? A required statement that explains why they decided to give bad karma might be interesting and might help to prevent misuse. But on the other hand a publicly visible list of karma givers coud also scare people to give bad karma at all... And a goog-karma-only feature... Hm... Maybe...

Personally, I don't feel the need for a karma feature. I prefer to form my own opinion depending on the posts I read. Generally, I don't need others to show me if s.o. is likable and helpful or not. So I would simply switch it off...

[pestaa]

Exactly. In any serious community, there is no room for points.

There is however a feature in smf to show only the sum of positive and negative karma.

[Ismael]

The only problem I see is not the karma feature, the people in the world are. Not receving a good karma when you should is sad!

[pestaa]

It's not that bad, because most people don't help only because of hope of more karma.

Receiving negative karma when you shouldn't is way more harmful.

[wei]

Quote

It's not that bad, because most people don't help only because of hope of more karma.



Receiving negative karma when you shouldn't is way more harmful.

That is reasonable, I think we may change to use total karma. May be something like "was this post helpful? [yes|no]" would be better

[pestaa]

I'd suggest to use [This was helpful. | This was harmful.] instead as it often takes several comments (q&a) to dig down enough to understand a problem. Not all non-helpful posts deserve karma deduction.

[pestaa]

As of IPB 3, this question is no longer relevant.

Though I'd be happy if there was some form of encouragement to provide feedback using +/- in bottom right corners.