NEGATIVE REP

[CJD]

So, rep on message boards is meant to serve one purpose:
Verifying the validity of a person's opinion as a Bengals fan.

If a person consistently posts coherent, helpful, intelligent and insightful things, his reputation will be high. This helps people to see his opinion and maybe give him your ear even if you disagree, just because he has proven to be a consistently logical and reasonable debater.

The problem came, however, when there's a person who gets a lot of positive reputation for their good posts, but if they had bad posts, you could not ding their reputation.

For example, say someone, when they're sober, is a very coherent and intelligent person. They will receive positive reputation to support this.

However, when they're drunk, or just in a bad mood, they become very angry, hateful and aggressive.

In a system with negative rep, his reputation will reflect that, though he makes good points on occasion, he is not the most reliable or most trustworthy source of information, and debating him may end with him just screaming obscenities.

In a system without negative rep, his reputation will only reflect the good posts he makes, but will not reflect the fact that he can go crazy sometimes.

I personally believe in negative rep. I exercise it when necessary and I believe it does, for one reason or another, encourage people to keep their shit off the message boards.

I think this message board has operated pretty well without it so far, but if anyone remembers the old message boards, we had some terrible people over there. And their reputation allowed you to see that it was negative, and then just know that the rest of the board is on your side and you don't need to argue with them for hours on end.

I am really happy about the implementation of negative reputation on these message boards.