Hi Everyone,

I need your help - or at least your opinion, and I would hope that a lot of people would use the poll on this thread to let us know how you feel about the Rep system on this site.

The Rep is for reputation and shows up as the green bar and your little tag when you hover the mouse cursor over it showing how well your doing. It was added a long time ago - when I was a normal member like most people on the site. I recall the time it started and we could all dish out just our 1 rep boost to someones score for a map we liked.

The forum implements an increase to the amount that you give out based on your rep score. So if you have 1000 rep then you might give out 10 points each time. Also, for every year you have been on the site you have another point on to that score.

We have a bit of a problem which was first acknowledged many years ago when people had boosts of +13 or +20. Time has gone by and now we have some members who have multi 10,000 rep scores where they dish out > 100 pts per hit. Our highest member is about 800 at a time. For even those members they have said that they have reigned in and not given out so many hits of rep because each time they do it then it boosts that members rep score by too much in one go. I think we have the situation where one hit will take somebody up several levels at once.

We have noticed that in recent times we have members with rep scores approaching 10,000 where they have made only a few posts. No doubt they have produced some amazing maps and art in their first few months on the forum.

So we have rampant rep inflation going on now.

So I thought that it would be a good idea to gauge just how people felt about the rep system by running a couple of polls.

The first one is just to see what the sentiment is like out there for rep and how you feel about it. Then I might do another one regarding what to do about it given the limitations of the forum.

So please vote on the poll and I would like for both the established members and also the newer members to make their voices heard. Do comment on this thread and express in words how you find it working for you and whether its important or whether you feel alienated by the amounts of rep being dished out or your ability to express how much you like other peoples work using the rep system.