I just noticed that too, and I think I might've added to my own reputation (if that's possible). I clicked on that cloudy white thing. Oops.
The feature your refering to is called "User Reputation" and is basically a way that vBulletin has come up with in order for users to rank each other, based on positive contribution to the boards. For instance, if someone makes an extremely helpful post, you would click the white button (that appears to look like two scales) located under that person's username. Over time each person would build up reputation, aiming to give an accurate summary on how much each person has contributed. It's sort of like the post count, but requires input from other members. You look at how many posts someone has made to get an indication of how active they are on the boards. Likewise, you can look at someone's reputation to see how helpful they are on the boards In other vBulletin Boards, the ability to deduct points has been given. However I dont see a way to deduct points and I wouldnt be suprised if that is left up to the mods or admin. Now, the question is...Was my post helpful?
purely a guess, but i think the square is just one of a series that gets added to as the person gets more points. I thougth the forum was acting a bit differently, i had no idea that it had been updated though.
Here is a list of the default titles: ========================================================== Also, just for reference, the ability to deduct points from people *is there* you just need to click on someone else's icon to either 'approve' or 'disapprove' of their post. Doing this either adds or subtracts 1 point. I'm curious to see how successful this reputation system actually is, since there is no 'rep count' under our post count (i realise there is the little green icon, but its not quite so prominent. Since it isnt seen very well, I'm not sure if many people will care all that much or bother to use it. Then again I might be wrong - but what are the chances of that :lol:
It sounds pretty pointless/dumb to me, just because it's such a popularity contest type of thing. I guess it might work somewhat in a much larger forum with many more members around to do rankings but for here it seems... not terribly useful.
It used to exist in the much larger adult gay forum owned by the people who run EC but it was withdrawn as it caused all manner of problems. It did become a popularity contest, with groups of people giving each other lots of positive rep and ganging up against others with loads of negative rep. I'm surprised it's even enabled here, and suspect it may have been done in error. It's probably best to ignore it, and hope it goes away soon!
