Question What is "karma" ?

What is the approved method then, here to report a bug? Surely you cannot tell me that this is a desirable effect of the karma system, that one person could simple take any other user to any amount of karma they wished, plus or negative.. That alone renders the complete system useless and non-beneficial. If no one else will step up, I'll list it as a bug/flaw.. Odd though that I never noticed it in the older versions, not sure why. Thought that the old one removed the buttons after you voted once, maybe it was template controlled, or for some reason I just never thought of clicking one twice, lol..

Why dont use the "Thank you" function instead?

Rooster wrote: Surely you cannot tell me that this is a desirable effect of the karma system, that one person could simple take any other user to any amount of karma they wished, plus or negative.. That alone renders the complete system useless and non-beneficial.

I'm not going to get into my favourite subject of why I feel that the karma feature is non-beneficial; it's a matter of individual choice.

By default, new installations of Kunena enable the karma feature. As a standard operating procedure, I disable the feature on my websites; that's my choice. The karma feature has always been problematic both from an ethical perspective and in a technical sense.

Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. I will pass along your comments and we'll see what can be done to rectify this ability to abuse karma. In the meantime, if you do not have the confidence that your users will use this feature in a responsible way, I suggest that you disable it.

Indeed, I shall disable it, though I do hope at some point the issue gets resolved. I somewhat agree in the usefulness, generally the people on my site are fair minded. We use the karma as a way to highlight 'valued' posters from punks. You'll more readily take advice from someone rated highly, than someone with 0 or a negative. The thanks serves as a great tool for a good thread, perhaps a cool post, or an answer to a question (as I've done on here), but doesn't allow you that overall "how does this person rate" kind of scenario. Appreciate the response and willingness to pass the issue along

Rooster wrote: ... generally the people on my site are fair minded. We use the karma as a way to highlight 'valued' posters from punks. You'll more readily take advice from someone rated highly, than someone with 0 or a negative.

That may be the case on your website as, we would also hope, it would be the case here at Kunena.com. However, the reality, because the karma feature lacks accountability - the ability to trace who is awarding or removing karma - explains why the feature was removed from Kunena.com about 12 months ago.

As I mentioned, I don't really want to argue whether or not the feature is useful, beneficial or desirable. These are matters of personal choice. There have been many discussions about karma, here at Kunena.com, as any search on the subject would show (e.g. What is "karma" ? as one of them).

We feel that it is better to "rate" the value of the contributions made - the substance of the messages posted, if you like to think of it in those terms - than some arbitrary, subjective (and open-to-abuse) measure of rating people. For example, if karma were to be re-instituted at this website, my karma rating would probably be negative several hundred because of the few people who happen to disagree with my views. This as opposed to the so-called "positive reinforcement" that some people naïvely believe a positive karma might achieve. We believe that the "Thank You" feature is a better way to go - and you can see how this translates if you look at the statistics here: www.kunena.com/forum/stats

I have also posted this in the 'Feature request' section as I think the idea has significant merit but in the meantime, I am looking for some general advice on making a simple hack as follows:

I would like to change the Karma system so that it operates like a Recommend system, discarding the negative value, leaving the positive value in place for this purpose. I am following the tutorial on how to change the word Karma to Recommend using this page: docs.kunena.org/index.php/How_I_can_change_the_name_Karma%3F

To complete this, which file(s) do I need to look at in order to comment out any reference to the negative value?

This will provide two important levels of feedback within the Kunena forum I'm working on, the first being a personal 'Thank you' acknowledgment wherever merited and the second recognising post content as having some tangible value to the reader.

Cheers,

Azure