Karma talk
There is a protective mechanism to the abuse of karma attribution. Members with higher karma have more "voice", they can attribute more points. Members with few karma (or even trolls with negative) have much less power so they can't allocate sufficient negative points to someone they want to take down.
This armed with only being able to give Karma to the same person once every 72 hours or so and not being able to give Karma to the same people too often (ie. a group of friends can't get give good karma to the same people each time - and can't gain the ability to do so by just spreading generic Karma... ie actually give a time limit of a month before they can or Karma suspensions/ dockings)
If you just spam generic Karma around people are going to become wary of you and give you low Karma therefore reducing you ability to affect other peoples Karma rating.
To be honest I can't really see why people would want to abuse this system, that would be quite sad. People will want to keep the status they have attained and will not want to lose it because of abuse of the system.
You may think that if somebody is given bad karma by another member they may just give them bad karma back, but this is not possible as if they are a member with very bad karma giving a low rating to a member with very high Karma, it will have a negligable effect.
(they will have a lower Karma than that person if as expected what they did to achieve that low Karma was noticed by more people than just the person who gave bad karma - and they therefore got multiple lots of Bad Karma).
The system should be self supporting and stay in equilibirum.
Infrequent posters are not demanding this system, I am just saying that we should try and support the majority of people signed up to this forum, not just he old-timers.
I can't quite see why people would bother answering saying things like: "Oh man, if he had answered me, he would have been SOOO helpful!", or any of the other witty quips you bit in the n00bs mouth.
While in almost all cases on
this forum they get the answers they need, it does not follow that therefore there is no reason to encourage any more helpful co-operation. :unsure:
The rating system (supposing it is not abused - see my reasons for not believing this above) would encourage people to be helpful and support the community even more than they do now.