DrakeM
You're just lucky god isn't here!
The "you must spread rep around" message is so annoying. It prevents you from recognizing quality posts and thanking the poster. Instead you get a slap saying you haven't lowered your standards enough to rep left, right, and center so you can actually rep real quality when you see it. Here's my suggested solution:
First, change rep internally in the board system from an integer to a floating point number so it can have decimals (when printing rep, just convert to integer and drop the decimals).
Second, allow rep to accumulate in fractions. Let's say right now you have "spread more rep around" because of some internal counter we currently can't see. I'll make a guess it is 20 at the maximum, i.e. I'm guessing that once you rep somebody you have to rep 20 more people before you can rep him again. So instead, if you try to rep him again, add 1/20 points to his total. If later you come by and the count it is down to 7, allow 1/7 rep to be added.
Third, to prevent abuse, if you already rep'ed at the 1/20th level and you try again, cut it in half and add 1/40 and so on. This is simply accomplished with adding a second integer counter to the existing one which counts up until you try to rep at something better than the 1/20 level at which point you just zero it.
The net effect is that you can add rep to someone, however small, every time you see a quality post and anyone trying to pile rep on someone just to bump up his totals is quickly thwarted.
Thoughts? As an ex-programmer, this seems like a very simple design change to me but then again, I've not see whatever code is running the board.
First, change rep internally in the board system from an integer to a floating point number so it can have decimals (when printing rep, just convert to integer and drop the decimals).
Second, allow rep to accumulate in fractions. Let's say right now you have "spread more rep around" because of some internal counter we currently can't see. I'll make a guess it is 20 at the maximum, i.e. I'm guessing that once you rep somebody you have to rep 20 more people before you can rep him again. So instead, if you try to rep him again, add 1/20 points to his total. If later you come by and the count it is down to 7, allow 1/7 rep to be added.
Third, to prevent abuse, if you already rep'ed at the 1/20th level and you try again, cut it in half and add 1/40 and so on. This is simply accomplished with adding a second integer counter to the existing one which counts up until you try to rep at something better than the 1/20 level at which point you just zero it.
The net effect is that you can add rep to someone, however small, every time you see a quality post and anyone trying to pile rep on someone just to bump up his totals is quickly thwarted.
Thoughts? As an ex-programmer, this seems like a very simple design change to me but then again, I've not see whatever code is running the board.
