What in the world is "reputation" and what does it mean?

Hello all,


As many of you know, I create posts from time to time. None of these are attacks against individuals or groups. Nor are there posts that are intentionally designed to cause conflict. In fact, if you pay attention to the content of my posts, they are filled with, what I perceive to be, constructive posts that challenge players to go outside of the norm with regard to PvP. But what I've noticed is, I get a lot of "bad reputations" as a result of these posts. Now, if the information that I offer to the community is seen as not constructive, then it is no problem for me to continue to do what I was doing before I chose to participate with, what many call, the "Dark Souls community." Please explain what "reputation" is and what exactly does it mean?
Thanks

In the upper right corner of the post, you see a + and a -. Basically, if people like your posts, they can give you a +, or if they dislike them, you get a -. Now, 1 out of every 5 of your posts gets a +, which is pretty darn good.

https://soulswiki.forumotion.com/t9540-reputation-guide

This ought to clear up any questions you might have about the system.

To step away from popular opinion and voice an alternative view there will be
individuals who will go out of their way to discredit you. I think "rep" should
be linked to individual posts rather than something you carry around.

omega Elf wrote:To step away from popular opinion and voice an alternative view there will be
individuals who will go out of their way to discredit you. I think "rep" should
be linked to individual posts rather than something you carry around.

@Martyr Rep on this site works well. We're only small so there isnt much troll repping so its a good indicator of the persons contribution to the forum. Tolvo will tell you he got all his from cracking jokes but I'd say that only accounts for about 50% of his. He also write a (admittedly subjective) view on it in the forum discussion area. Basically if your rep is positive and over 10 it means you've been helpful and people like you for it. Whereas if your rep is say -5, it means people dislike you, you are deliberatedly unhelpful or you are trolling.

Hey, about 80% of my rep comes from jokes.
Coincidentally, 4 out of my negative rep also comes from jokes.

DoughGuy wrote:if your rep is say -5, it means people dislike you, you are deliberatedly unhelpful or you are trolling.

Correct. Every post they submit is an attempt by them to troll or in some
way be unhelpful. Whereas someone with 111 rep who openly admits to
trolling is not infact trolling but is infact being helpful and is liked by everyone
I can see how that makes perfect sense. By the way I consider your post
to be trolling or at least an attempt to further discredit the reputation of
other community members whilst boosting your own.

Someone seems a little bitter *cough* Elf *Cough*....

Rep doesn't mean that much to be honest. Whenever you share an opinion you risk being downrepped, it's happened to me just for disagreeing politely with people. In other words, you can't win. First of all, having 27 rep for 100 posts is extremely high. Secondly, the only real way to be liked universally on the internet is to have no opinions, which is stupid, especially is you care enough about a game to make a video playing it and post it on the forums. So if people get butthurt by you saying you don't like to use the DWGR, that's not your problem, it's theirs.

Reputation can mean that someone found one of your post insightful, particularly constructive, or perhaps funny. It can also means that someone found some posts to be insipid, aggressive, or vacuous. While dignity, and disagreements should never have been brought together, some people place a certain measure of pride in their words, and feel slighted when some error is pointed out. I am guilty of defending a weak idea on the grounds that the time invested in writing would make something more correct. I try to avoid that as best I can, but if in my occasional posts I am wrong, and someone corrects me, I feel that is worth the 'rep up'. I personally want reputation to be given to constructive comments, ideas, and events.

Take it with a grain of salt. At least a third of mine are just me cracking jokes in silly threads. The rest are from me just trying to be helpful or witty.

Lets tighten up the good ole' + function on the post of martyrs BrainSlug

J now remembers me pretty clearly - haha Shortdude and I are arseholes.

Anyway - back from vacation so some tomfoolery is in order I guess :face:

No worries, its not a big deal. I have noticed that someone always -1 reps you whenever you post, but i counter that with a +1

oh on a note the +1 for J was due to a rather interesting question. It is pretty helpful. Actually I may +1 that rep guide plug also

Yes I have that guide on Rep, which has subjective parts to it. But, it also has the factual aspects to it, more so with just how exactly reputation works. If I'm talking about how rep effects a person, I'm talking about how it seems the community perceives things. If I'm talking about numbers, I'm usually talking about how reputation actually works rather than my opinions about the system.

Also guys remember to be nice, even if you feel someone isn't being nice to you, turn the other cheek. It was the teaching of a great man after all, Winston Churchill.

I assume it was roan that also threw a +1 to J - any other fellow Twitch members here?

Like everyone else said, it's trivial to pay attention to rep very closely. I was recently down voted for asking people if they would change anything on a build I was crafting. I chuckled silently and moved on.

Sometimes negative rep is definitely deserved though, sometimes people create topics for the sake of starting flame wars, insult others, and try to troll people. We do have people giving out negative rep for the hell of it as we all have probably noticed at some point or another. But also pay attention to what you get negative repped for. If you are posting useful info about how to use a weapon and get a negative rep, probably someone is just trying to annoy you. If you post about how you think people who play X way suck, and get negative repped. It's for insulting people who play X way. I'm not saying youas in, Umbasa who posted before me. I'm saying you as in, the person reading this whoever it is. Just pay attention what people are being repped for, positively or negatively.

@Tolvo

Yeah, I've given negative rep because people knock on playstyles or ask for opinions and then single out every opinion but their own. I've been negatively affected once or twice for being an arse, but other than that i have an invisible foe out there possibly ninjaing my posts occasionally. I say this because I get randomly negative rep'd on a regular schedule. Every few days actually. It's usually on something like this which isn't really doing anything but asking for advice. I can hardly take this negative point seriously.

You might have gotten negative repped for the font color, but it seems unlikely that would be the reason since no one complained about it openly. Yes, sometimes we get some reputations given out like that, and it does suck because if enough people start doing that it sort of breaks the system. If you look at my reputation guide which I think is decent, and mentions the other views of reputation and how not everyone uses the same way, it has a negative rep. There's really no reason for such a post to have a negative rep, so I sort of just chock that up to a hidden troll. But, I have had moments before where I let emotions get the best of me and received a negative rep for something I said out of character, but those I understand were completely because of my words. We just have to look at what we might have done to offend others and try to correct it for our future posts. But if there is no material that could conceivably be worth a negative rep, well yeah probably someone was just trying to bother you. Some of us have noticed a rise in it lately.

I also considered the possibility that font was the reason, but it seems very secular either way. If you don't like color or the color blue just leave the thread. I can't expect everyone to be this mature, but I guess my point is that one should take rep as a multidimensional popular rating and while it can be invaluable in some situations don't take it explicitly "to heart." I think it's somewhat damaging because once you go negative you can't really show people that you may or may not appreciate a post. This sort of encourages people with positive rep to sometimes form "clicks" and people that are actually trying and may make a mistake feel unwanted. This is why I have developed my complex rating system that is based off of character, intent and post history/rep value.


I think you and Maneater Mildred are some of my favourite posters to respond to personally. Some others worth citing for their knowledge of pvp being WyrmHero, Forum Pirate, and Fruitpunchninja. I rarely ever see these people get emotional or attached to specific playstyles when helping people.

PS- The main purpose I have cited all of this information is for people reading into this thread to maybe gather a few positive and negative views and decide for themselves how and why to use the rep feature.

Yeah that's one issue, but its also why I always try to be so open to other people and base my views off their posting history. When I see a person has negatives, I try to find out why they have negatives. I think that's a bit of a better way to look at it. Rather than just seeing a negative rep and writing them off, just kind of take it as "Do a background check." The same can be said for people with a high reputation, find out why they have such a high reputation. If someone checked when I was at the one hundred mark, most of my rep ups were just from me making jokes about shows and cartoons in the 90's, though I turned more so towards being helpful after that. There is always that issue of not trying to intimidate people with the size of a forum, the posts of people, or reputation of members. It's why so many lurk, they're unsure about joining in. But I like to think we are typically approachable.

And I can understand the font, with the black background it was really hard to read. But if so they would have just said like, "Hey man could you use white? The blue is hard to read."

Also people need to stop talking about how cool I supposedly am. It makes it difficult to be humble, my ego needs to be held in check haha.

If someone checked when I was at the one hundred mark, most of my rep ups were just from me making jokes about shows and cartoons in the 90's, though I turned more so towards being helpful after that.

Man I wish I was there for the 90's jokes! I would've loved them.

Also people need to stop talking about how cool I supposedly am. It makes it difficult to be humble, my ego needs to be held in check haha.

I actually put those other names in there partly to try and keep you humble. I tried to pair up equally helpful, polite, and interesting members.

We have a lot of useful people that just aren't around anymore, Blaine sometimes stops by. Everyone you mentioned, Dough is really helpful often, it's kind of hard to name people because we just have so many. Although some are coming back, like Mildred.

I've been trying to make more of my jokes in the off topic section as of late, so that if I get repped up for them I don't actually get the rep, so any bumps up I get are mainly from useful posts. But if you ever want some quick cheap rep, make some puns. It always works.