[nirvAnA]

It has now been almost a week where the ability to give negative reputation was removed from the reputation system. This whole thing came about after Pinder's suggestion to me to have neg rep removed. I felt there were merits in his suggestion and there was mixed response in our admin chat so I decieded rather then straight away removing it, to test it out for a week and let the community give their feedback after trying it out, and then re-evaluate.

Q: Should there be negative rep in our rep system?

Reasons for removing was stated in this earlier post:
"It was brought to my attention that the negative reputation was harming the community. In an ideal world, the reputation system would have just be used as a way to express how you felt about a particular post's CONTENT. However, people were taking the neg reps the wrong way, getting angry at those who have neg repped them, blindly neg repping people back etc.

Worse of all, some people were just using the system to neg rep people they didn't like when someone else who posted the same content would not be neg repped. Basically it was making most of the community more and more angry with each other, making poor relations even worse and fueling a lot of unnecessary drama."

Reasons for having negative rep:
Its a fun to use feature and we should be able to express our dislike for something, freedom! Its an easier way to express with a simple frowny than making a long post thats far too much effort. People who abuse this can always have their rep powers taken away so others can continue using it.

The rep system is not to be taken personally, it is just an opinion after all. *unless a personal attack is embeded in the message, or u dont like the poster so u neg rep him then look for a reason in his post to justify it - thats something else and falls under abuse.

Other alternatives:
Keeping it but renaming the reputation word to something else, like "likes"
Keeping it but disallowing comments for negative rep.
Keeping it by removing the frowny face which seems to piss people off lol
Keeping it but also allowing neutral comments for neutral commenting which carries 0 weightage and has a chat box has an icon


Admins and mods will re-evalute based on the feedback given in this thread and votes collected.