OK, wierd.

What's displayed in the user profile section regarding reputation doesn't correlate in a way that's obvious to me at the moment with what's in the actual reputation data file. I found a way to download it as a CSV importable into Excel, and now have the whole thing on my desktop. I don't understand all that I see, but here are some things of relevance:
  • Most reputation votes are ineffective attempts by those with reputation too low to really have a vote.
  • By far the most frequent effective negative reputation giver is ME, mostly for folks y'all all know about, like UGaGuard. The time line indicates that most people I ding either go quiet, or else get 'piled on' in short order.
  • There is some tit-for-tat voting going on -- that's a problem I'll have to look at further.
  • Most of the votes I could quickly decipher seemed valid.
  • Many of those who have voted inappropriately have more than suffered the consequences in terms of being 'punished' for inappropriate votes. Voting negative rep hastily is a good way of loosing a lot of rep yourself . . . and that's as it should be!
  • And -- I'm sorry to do this publicly, but it's already being discussed widely privately, apparently: WaterBear, you do need to lay off the reputation voting for now.
More than that, I promise I'll re-examine the reputation thing before next spring. Actually, there is a bunch of work to be done, to work out some issues with what might be called the relational and philosophical aspects of the forum.

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm looking at a number of substantial changes. The whole problem with the hackers is going have an impact, as well. Part of the problem is that I've never had time to dig into the 'guts' of vBulletin since installing it this past spring. As a result, I've never found out how to tweak some things that don't have a corresponding 'knob' or 'dial' in the Admin control panel. The fast time out on logged users is just one example, of something begging for adjustment.

But there are some other, more fundamental, issues to address, as well.

Until next spring, when those changes will be evident, I'd ask y'all to just bear with me, if you can.

Thanks,

Ben