I think the "logged in" label is a bit misleading, since most of us use cookies to automatically stay logged in. Perhaps a better name would be "daily visit" or something.

That's a fair point, perhaps it would be better labelled something like "daily visit".

My only issue is with members being given points just for logging in. It doesn't make sense (to me at least).

I originally thought this as well when we introduced the new system, but I've since come around to actually liking the daily 1up.

One of the complaints we sometimes get about the reputation system -- far more with the old system than the current one, but it's still mentioned occasionally -- is that a member can sometimes lose a lot of points just by asking a particularly stupid question, unintentionally giving bad advice, or even simply by posting a bad joke, and unfortunately it can sometimes seem like it's impossible to recover those lost points. It can also be very discouraging to a beginner to receive even a single down-vote on their first day if someone doesn't like the question they post, or similar.

In this way, I think giving users +1 for each day they visit the site provides a good natural balancing factor so that reputation can always be slowly recovered over time. By simply continuing to visit and participate you can gradually recover from a large loss of reputation, or pretty quickly recover from one or two errant down-votes.

...and as the example of glhf shows, this certainly doesn't stop the effect of consistent down-voting on a reputation; in my opinion this actually makes a particularly low reputation a better indicator of bad behaviour or spreading misinformation than it was with previous systems, because you know the user (assuming they're reasonably regular) hasn't simply made some mistake and had their reputation butchered years ago -- to get a really low reputation they must be consistently down-voted to counter-act the daily +1.


As a user said in another topic -- it's a single virtual "point" in an online reputation system -- 1 point doesn't cost us anything, and if it encourages more frequent visiting (which will hopefully lead to more posting) and keeps a few people happy it's probably a good thing.

I had the "bad joke" thing happen to me once

Anyway, I like the reputation system. Its good that upvoting someone else's post gives you a point too since it encourages the idea of (indirectly) saying "Hey! This is good info, good work!" to other users, even if you don't post anything in the thread you can "compensate" someone for writing something interesting.

I personally dislike the rep system compared to the old one. I understand thats its nice to award forum participation but imo when im reading the forum the rep doesnt mean anything to me anymore. I used to ask alot of questions on these forums and I remember how nice it was to be able to tell if youre question is being answerd by an expert or by a person on my level who happen to know the answer. Not saying the non expert wasnt helpfull but when in doubt I knew whos opinion I should attach more weight to (I know even the expert can be wrong but as a beginner programmer you cant tell so you have to choose something as truth and experiment from there).

I realize that it was very hard to gain rep and only a small percentage of forum members got high rep but I feel thats a good thing for the reason stated above. I dont think that a casual hobby programmer needs a similar rep than some of the more serious indies/industry professionals on this forum. Its nice to encourage participation but imo its nicer to be able to gauge the experience of the person replying to your post. (As a disclaimer I never had a high rep on the old system)

Its nice to encourage participation but imo its nicer to be able to gauge the experience of the person replying to your post.

To be fair, the reputations of experienced long term members still massively exceed those of the newer and less experienced.

With only one point per day for participation and 4 points per up-vote it's actually possible for the best quality responses to provide more of a rep boost than a whole year of daily visits - and you also have the votes on each individual post to help judge good vs bad advice.

Its just a matter of timming. Be ready when a wild "Trying to learn to code with C++" thread appears! If you happen to be one of the first 5 or so people to explain why C++ is bad for beginners, you're golden

Its just a matter of timming. Be ready when a wild "Trying to learn to code with C++" thread appears! If you happen to be one of the first 5 or so people to explain why C++ is bad for beginners, you're golden

I have to agree with this, those threads are reputation fountains. A well-crafted first answer can net you 10+ upvotes easily.

Reputation is such an everlasting source of anger...

Generally, any time anyone has expressed issues with the rep system it's been a case of there being something else going on behind it - a difficult user, or whatever. That's not always true, but it's been a useful rule of thumb recently - you see a complaint about the system and you can almost always guarantee that the person complaining has a record of showing all the subtlety of an anvil with "50 Tons" written on it in their interactions with others.