Rain Dog wrote:I notice you did not include my original point in your reply perhaps out of fear of inflaming the previous Muslim Bashing thread. This is not my intention. If you value social cohesion more than spirited debate you might want to censor religious and political threads --- just as in real life Politics and Religion are topics best avoided in social situations. This is particularly true if racism or bigotry is involved.

Dara wrote:Rain Dog is hesitant about censorship being the answer.

He may be thinking......if you start, where do you stop.

Money is not allowed as a topic as it is in poor taste and makes
vlad uncomfortable. vlad wants it banned and will do whatever it takes.

And sex. It is handled carefully now, but isn't that a topic that could
blow up ? So no nightlife section. k440 never allowed it for that reason.

And if you censor all the topics that could cause a problem, the posters
that want to cause a problem will do that on a geese thread.
really! A remark made there almost blew up.

Soi Dog wrote: Any parts of a thread that degrade into an overly heated slag-fest should be removed from that thread and moved to their own thread in the asinine area asap.

Joon wrote:I also support the posts' like function. vBulletin has that, including embedded comments to posts themselves.

On another massive forum I know (1 million+ members), they use a reputation system (pretty much like Karma) but they set it up so that any one member cannot increase or decrease reputation points of another member immediately after he/she did. The member needs to spread out rep points to a certain number of other members before he/she can add or withdraw rep points to the previous member.
That's a good way of encouraging to spread out kudos and mitigate undue "rep wars."

Joon wrote:I also support the posts' like function. vBulletin has that, including embedded comments to posts themselves.

On another massive forum I know (1 million+ members), they use a reputation system (pretty much like Karma) but they set it up so that any one member cannot increase or decrease reputation points of another member immediately after he/she did. The member needs to spread out rep points to a certain number of other members before he/she can add or withdraw rep points to the previous member.
That's a good way of encouraging to spread out kudos and mitigate undue "rep wars."

Rain Dog wrote:

Joon wrote:I also support the posts' like function. vBulletin has that, including embedded comments to posts themselves.

On another massive forum I know (1 million+ members), they use a reputation system (pretty much like Karma) but they set it up so that any one member cannot increase or decrease reputation points of another member immediately after he/she did. The member needs to spread out rep points to a certain number of other members before he/she can add or withdraw rep points to the previous member.
That's a good way of encouraging to spread out kudos and mitigate undue "rep wars."

The problem with such systems is that they usually result in "Mob Role". On some forums if your "reputation" is lowered enough, your posts are hidden. Thus having a diversity of viewpoints is much more difficult. For example if you expressed outrage at the latest Israeli slaughter of Civilians on Gaza and there was an organized Pro-Israel contingent on the board they would all attack your "reputation".

In many ways the "Reputation" function can turn out to be another form of Censorship if certain groups form to abuse it.