I bet most people around here didn't know that! I didn't for sure, but then again I have never given someone bad rep... I didn't say that people would have liked it.
They definitely know... pull up the rep box on a post and click the "I disapprove" option. You get a red message letting you know.
There is no filter in reputation and since the 2 admins (Shawn and Rob) have better things to do you can generally get away with it but when they catch you they nuke you. So is it worth a 1 year ban ?
Its a nice feature it should prevent spammers and liars from cheating premium members at the least. Honestly, I don't understand the need for the users to create false profiles to complete their trades, they could be honest at least with their country of origin.
People are abusing the reputation system pretty much lately. I have received a few -ve just because they disagree with my opinion when they could just ignore my post. But that's not a problem for me because the +ve's got much higher points than the -ve's so I'm always moving up.
They are overusing the system which could potentially harm new users from participating in the BST section. The system is meant to award or point out serious mistakes, not just dropping a -ve whenever you dislike something.
Dude, you repeatedly describe exactly what it's for and then say it's not for that.... If they are a bad user in the forum pissing people off and giving bad advice then they probably don't care about their account so they deserve the red rep. and when I'm buying stuff in the BST I am glad that it's there to help me to decide who to deal with and not to deal with... I think rep is perfect the way it is. You lose a point if you give negative so it discourages people (a little) from leaving negatives unless the user feels there needed or deserved. My ONLY complaint with the rep system is that it's a little icon that most people don't notice so they don't use it (I like the way it was in VB3).
The system automatically stops people from giving too much rep, positive or negative, in a short time. So, I think what you call "overuse" is a way to describe a rep you didn't agree with. Obviously someone thought you deserved it, since they gave it to you. The best thing you can do with rep, if you can't learn something from it, is just ignore it. Maybe Shawn agrees with you, but I do not see any rule that says this. I think you can give a rep for any reason your heart desires. It will always be subjective anyway, what people find worthy of +rep or -rep.
I don't know how to avoid such things but what I can think of is adding a ratio limit to the system, so that users can't just give like 20 negatives and 1 positive, I know it harms yourself too but users with hundreds of point don't seem to care.
Do you think it could sometimes be wrong? I received an email where the true country was quite surprising, and I have doubts as to whether it could be correct. Could that individual have been using some kind of ip software or something?
It's pretty accurate. It's also relatively good at detecting anonymous proxies, and if it sees that, it will say "Anonymous Proxy" as the country. It's of course not 100%, but I would say it's around 99.999% accurate. If you got a PM from someone and it says they are in a specific country, I would bet money that they are in that country. For sake of argument, let's say it says the user is in Nigeria, but they only showed as being in Nigeria because they were on some private/undetectable proxy. Then I would ask myself, why is this person going through the trouble of going through a proxy in Nigeria? Either they are IN Nigeria, or are really going pretty far out of their way to hide something.