I had to report some comments and request thread closure, and was going to remark on it in the Reputation of one user, for continuing the argument and ignoring my request to stop. Then I saw that that wouldn't work, because Reputation comments may only be positive. Am I right that that's because a "Subtraction" feature would be abused?

The "addition" feature can also be "abused" (e.g., add reputation to posts only because they happen to agree with your point of view/politics/ideology), but "subtraction" hurt people's feelings more so it was removed. If you dig back far enough in this forum you can probably find some of the posts about it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Better to use the report feature if people are not acting in a professional manner.

There was a time when you could remove reputation. I think it should be incredibly obvious what happened between then and now.

1 members found this post helpful.

I pay attention to the reputation feature for only one reason. I am curious to know what posts I've made that others have found helpful.

I must admit that, sometimes, the responses puzzle me for reasons like those mentioned by ntubski, but, beyond that, as far as I an concerned, it's a mere bagatelle, not to be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, I understand that, when a "minus" option was available, it became subject to abuse for petty ad hominem reasons.

Just my two cents.

Yes; but as stated in the OP, I did that first.

Subtracting reputation is petty and unconstructive.

If people derail a topic, simply ask them to take their discussion elsewhere, if they persist, report the relevant post(s) to a moderator.

You've done that, and it has worked.

(If it hadn't worked, it would be a task for a moderator to resolve, but it did, so nothing more needs to be done.)

This comes up time and again... can't understand the petty obsession some have with the reputation system here. The system is flawed and always has been - the "positive" aspect is for insecure types with fragile egos who like to measure their green bars, the negative side was for childish and vindictive ones - they miss it...

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Humanity has always looked for a way to mark who is better than each other. It does nothing but sow division. Very small on a forum but people get lit up over dumb stuff all the time (I include myself in this group. we all do). As tolerant as anyone may think they are after a few negative reps they will come less and less. I can imagine it would only serve to remove people who have plenty to offer. While what they say may be perfectly valid and accurate people are just nasty. We are all guilty of it.

Could you imagine the negative rep ocean when systemd was still discussed regularly?

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If the system is so flawed, what if all attempts to add or detract from a reputation went through moderators? I suppose that would create too much work for them.

Ehh, if you knew why I wanted to add to or detract from a reputation, you'd agree that I am not abusing the system. I haven't done it yet because I'm still waiting for a moderator response to my requests to close the thread.

Moderators, and indeed members as a whole, for the most part have other priorities. Usually, catering to the whims of the professionally offended doesn't factor - or is near the bottom of the list.

1 members found this post helpful.

On the moderator thing…

When it became an issue, Jeremy took the position that only “egregious” abuses of the ability to downrep would be investigated. I have no idea if he deemed any incident to be “egregious” enough, but I do know that cases of obvious retaliation were allowed to stand.

I should mention that no-one was actually allowed to see who downrepped them, and the stated purpose of this "was to prevent retaliation".

I think you can see why this entire system was acknowledged to be untenable a short time later.

Threads should be rated on the quality of the technical help. The problem is two things. One is threads get out of hand but not to the point of taking action. I'd have closed many threads and deleted posts but since it was noted above, jeremy's viewpoint it to not overdo responses.

You can ignore the posts directly or indirectly. I am sure the forum mod(s) have seen the post and didn't have clear way to go. It's not my forum.

Reputation is only a metric. As you can see from your post it is clear that you would wish to remove points arbitrarily without regard to the technical aspect.

LQ is one of the more friendly forums. It can only stay that way if members treat others well and professionally. It can only stay so if members ignore posts that don't help.

Delete posts? I thought LQ never deleted posts.

Most of the deleted posts are spam. Others could be those that are way outside of common decency. Posts below spam get removed.

There has been a million thoughts on reputation. Only use it as any metric like MPG or such.