Karma Abuse

[j3rk]

Originally Posted by Gusto

maybe people should just stop taking karma so seriously. obviously a lot more karma, both good and bad, is going to be distributed if you take off the limits. i'm more annoyed by shitty posts having like 4+ karma for nothing, haha. besides, as soon as i see a collapsed post i check to see what was so bad about it. the karma games will get boring for everyone again soon anyway.

People will get bored shortly and it will stop being an issue. I agree.

First off I would like to apologize to Alla and hope she understands that her being our first test target was nothing personal and hope shes not dieing in pain from bad karma.

What I do find personal is that out of a group of 13 (10 active) Robyn and I were the only ones mentioned publicly and punished for finding the loop hole.

We were punished for "abusing the system" and giving bad karma for no reason. Our punishment was -700 karma from ONE MOD??? Why were we the only ones punished?


Kimmie, next time ill make sure to include you :)


My favorite part is were is says "this post was voted down by fnk members" when indeed 5 member have given the post good karma and one mod gave it the -700.

[cubed]

Originally Posted by j0rd

No. That's not it's function. That seems to be what you and your friends are using it for.

The function of the karma system is to lower the emphasis on shitty posts and to raise the awareness of good posts and so far it's been working pretty well.

In a utopian world this would be the case.

ALARM BELLS ARE RINGING JORDY!!!

Take a look out your window, you're not dealing with a world full of marionettes that do what they're supposed to.

The only way that your system would be used for it's purpose is if it was on a much larger scale with a far less tight knit community. People are always going to click that plus on someone they know rather than give them that big ol X.

Step outside the pipe dream realize you're dealing with far too many variables to think that it would be used for the purpose intended.

[Carrie]

I got a pm from myles and some bad karma.

I did not get -700 yet.

[j3rk]

Step outside the pipe dream realize you're dealing with far too many variables to think that it would be used for the purpose intended.

i know the loopholes in the karma system.

Let me explain to you how you can abuse it. And then i'll explain how i will know you're doing it.

I can get the sum or how much karma 1 user has given to another user. I can also see at which rate this happend at. If i see one user has given another user like 20 karma points in 1 day... this sticks out pretty easily.

Now you can avoid this by logging in as another user, but then i can check your IPs and see if they're coming from the same computer. You can use a randomizing proxy to avoid this, but you're still going to need multiple accounts and shit...don't you have better things to do? I still have a way to catch this though. It's not implemented, but could be very easily. I implemented a similar fix on a clients join pages, who had a hired hacker to submit fraudulent credit card transactions to get my client kicked off his merchant account. Recall i do actually detect credit card fraud for a living.

The other way to go about it is to get a whole bunch of users to gang up on a single post or user. Now if they give this person too much karma over a short period...again i'll notice. And if you do it over a longer period of time...so that i don't notice....do i care?

As mentioned. I could implement fixes to resolve this. But i've been trying to get the gallery system back up and setup your profiles. Instead i'm sitting here trying to explain the karma system. It's a lot more time effective for me to just ban people who are blatantly abusing the system.

This thread was posted as a warning.

What I do find personal is that out of a group of 13 (10 active) Robyn and I were the only ones mentioned publicly and punished for finding the loop hole.

You two were the worst offenders. It's not personal. I don't even know you. You were lynched as an example to the others to stop doing it. So far it's worked. Threads like this are a great way to make kids know what is and isn't acceptable in the forums. Much like the "WHY DOES J0RD HAET RAWB" thread.

"Lynch law" is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to preserve order.

And remember kids.