Yup, this is very true. I find the rep system useful only in that it provides a way to make "thankyou" posts without the overhead of a full post (bumping thread, etc). Otherwise, it's fairly useless; the sum of "rep points" is best ignored.

LQ has reputation points and I use them.

I've long since said that I agree that we do not have negative reputation.

In fact I'm wondering where selfprogrammed actually does feel that this really did happen on LQ because I've never seen or known that it was ever a part of the rep system for LQ. Hasn't been however long I've been on the site.

I look at it more about offering thanks, be that personal or in response to a technically helpful post. And that's how I give out reputation, either because in a discussion that is open where I agree or support or feel the poster aided my point, or if I feel in a technical question the person did help the OP, or offered advice which should or would help if the OP took that advice.

Over time, it is just something which is. Also you'll notice that while members have some number of green boxes, that line stops growing.

When they are the OP asking a question, I may look at the tenure of the poster as well as their number of posts. I find it personally very interesting to see some long time members of very small post counts, choose to chime in with questions. (Or answers for that matter.) It's good to see and I'm glad they're participating by reading, even if they limit when they decide to offer any inputs.

The real bottom line is I read what a person wrote and decide if it makes sense to me. This is no matter if it is someone's first post, or 10,000th.

Additional edit:
My life feedback here is that any time I've sought after approval for something, I've found myself potentially getting more frustrated because things didn't happen as I anticipated. And I feel I've self taught myself to not worry about whether or not someone says thank you in a particular manner. In fact, there are many, many cases where an OP will write back something attune to, "That worked! Thank you very much!!!" and never give reputation. I'm PERFECTLY FINE with that, in fact finer than if they didn't reply and instead chose to give me reputation. Why? Because they did a nice thing with being polite and giving the nearest form of verbal feedback they could, they wrote "Thanks!" As others have said, reputation just grows over time, providing you happen to actually be helpful, or say some correct and helpful things. But I would be far happier if it were to be the case where someone said, "That's right! I agree and thanks for your thoughts!", or even, "Well, I think you're overlooking ..." and add to the conversation constructively, and thus open my perspective a bit to things I hadn't considered.

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^ i'm not in it for the rep points, either. that would be ridiculous. (that said, i do like to see my green bar grow )
of the 6 forums i regularly post in, only 2 have rep points.
a real written response is always better.

A nice idea is a reputation bar with two colours: green and red. Green for fame and red for infamy. I want infamy!

1 members found this post helpful.

I want what he's having! ^

1 members found this post helpful.

People who get hot headed, feel they just have to comment, but have no information about the Original Question, are part of the problem. I now have two trolls on the PulseAudio thread, who feel they just HAVE to argue with everyone that "PulseAudio works for them".
They just posted again (after I marked the thread as SOLVED), and their posts each come with 3 "Likes", even before I see them.
They have nothing in those posts that help, and in fact they are fighting with everyone that tries to answer the OP. They cannot understand that we need some fixes for the people for whom the PulseAudio does not work.

It is galling that the trolls are getting more Rep than any of the people who actually are trying to answer the OP.

What part of this is so hard to understand that postings keep wandering off into some kind of strange analysis.

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Feedback ?? Unless you are going to go back and reread all your postings to see if anyone gave you a "Like", you do not get any feedback. Your rep may slowly increase over time, but it is more mystery than feedback. What I see is that if you get "Is this Helpful" clicks then your Rep goes up and future posts get more credibility. If in some future LQ question you say change it this way, and someone else says change it that way, your posting may have more credibility if your Rep is higher.

There may be an alternative way to give feedback, but that is not what I am concerned with.
My observation is that the "Is this Helpful" Rep system is being abused as a "Like" system, which apparantly the trolls use to support each other.

It does not take many trolls abusing this system to make is useless for its intended purpose. When you stop fighting the abusers it does hurt the useful people that LQ really depends upon.

I know that this system is sloppy to begin with, so it does not add anything to this thread to say again that the system is sloppy. Some information is better than none, especially for the newbies who might believe anything they see in a return post. But unfortunately, bad Rep information can be far worse than none at all. Newbies will not have read this thread and do not know not to trust the Rep.

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So why did the Rep system get invented in the first place. Probably because for a new poster, they cannot tell a reliable poster from a troll. I recognize only a few user names, and the rest could be anybody. The number of posts may help, or it could just indicate a prolific poster. Every site gets a few people who use the site as a conversation site, that is they post "I like", "I hate", and "It works for me" postings, but they never seem to have any really helpful information. Is that not why someone went through the trouble to setup the Rep system in the first place.

For newcomers the reputation may mean credibility. My posts are usually snappy, as such they do not earn rep often, even if the content happens to be helpful. I feel if I turned my rep bar on it would lower my credibility. Then, why post at all if your post goes likely unnoticed.
I agree it should be "I like it", not reputation.

That is not a problem with the reputation system, but a problem with people. The fanboys who worship anything new, good or bad, but have little to no undertanding of how the system works. Such posts should result in warnings to stop disrupting threads or be banned. Unfortunately, it is part of today's Linux culture and will exist with or without foolish reputation systems.

yes, i miss the dislike/downvote button sometimes.
but we all know where that would lead... no, this way is much better, much more civilised.

When we do right no one remembers.
When we do wrong no one forgets.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for explaining the situation.

If people are making non-constructive posts, I suggest hitting the "Report" button to ask the moderators to intervene.


Check out https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/usercp.php

No, what happens is that someone should cite confirming documentation, or post an experiment to show which claim is true. Usually it turns out that there was a misunderstanding, and each person was making slightly different unstated starting assumptions.

If folks are really just going to believe anything next to the the bigger green bar, they are not going to get much information off the internet regardless.

Folks, excuse me.
I do not follow all your argumentation, as it is very “meta”, sometimes and I may just lack the experience to see the point.

There appear to be different ways to perceive the reputation points. And in consequence it may appear useless to some, a nice feature to others. But there is no tragedy in the uses and abuses of an otherwise pretty much “decorative” element to a discussion forum...

When I began posting on LQ, I did not want to care about the reputation. But being unable to detect all the cases, where I create misunderstandings because of ill-composed phrases, I would nowadays even condone down-rating of my posts; everything which helps me improve my performance (... I am neither an Indian programmer nor born Japanese, do not get me wrong, already!).., is welcome. As you do not want to react with an explicit etymological examination of the English words, I use more often than others, I have learned to appreciate the ratings and even the “helpful” feature...

This said, the reputations of other contributers in the forum do, in fact, not count so much for me and do not influence me a lot... I may feel more respect for people who posted a lot and have at the same time an awesome number of reputation points. But if I do, my attitude were wrong. I am working on that.

If you ask me, do not change anything (if that is the point of this current thread).

1 members found this post helpful.

This post contains only false information, yet is flagged as helpful. What a great system.

Which bits are false?
Mint kernel works?
Mint kernel has Ubuntu patches?
Dell and Ubuntu have cooperated?

.............no reply.

It seems that a single person marked that post as "helpful". Would you prefer that the tally only be shown after multiple people have done so? Or never?

Ideally false info would not be shown as "helpful", but I don't see how the system could determine what is true or false without magic (or maybe a multi-million-$ team of researchers). (note: I have not examined the linked thread in detail, I have no idea whether that specific post is false or not)