So if the big fish rep you, you get more prestige. That makes sense. Can you give away too many reps? I see posters commenting about lock-outs, or something.
Not necessarily getting more prestige. In general practice yes, but this software thrives on the participation trophies approach. You can only award so many reps to the same poster, maybe 2 or 3 times, and that you get a dialog box advising, "You can not award more rep to that poster until you spread some rep around to others."
Say there's a solid poster who clearly explains why a incomplete pass in an ND game lacked sufficient possession time to be ruled a completion by NCAA regs. Meanwhile there's another poster who keeps ranting "well it would be a completion if my Packers (inject favorite HS or pro team) were playing it would be a completion." The solid poster than patiently responds explaining the difference between the college and HS or pro rules. The whiner interjects with, "That's a stupid rule." The solid poster then explains the rationale for the rule.
You try to award the solid poster with a rep for each post and you are denied. (I suspect that many be the lock-outs or too many reps you refer to.) So if you really want to rep the guy with the great posts you have to rep a bunch of twits first (participation posters).
As a result many of your "big fish" that have been here for years have purchased Unlimited Reputation through the vbPlaza. My rep power is around 60K. So I was rewarding low quality posts with a big chunks of Rep simply so I could rep that valuable poster that had several brilliant, funny, or useful posts. With Unlimited Reputation I can give you rep time after time BUT you don't get 60K at a time. When one purchases Unlimited Reputation your accrued rep power is reduced to 1 Rep at a time.
So in one case you get a rep from a big fish and get 50,000 rep points. Another big fish with Unlimited Rep gives you a rep and you only get 1 point. Hence my opening comment, "Not necessarily getting more prestige."
In the early day of this site, you had to work hard to develop reputation as everybody only had 1 or 2 Reputation Points to give with a rep. Other the years the numbers grew. A new poster 12 years ago might have gotten 1 rep from several posters welcoming him to the board. Today, a new poster might get several hundred thousand reps for his first post (from half a dozen big fish).
Similar situation with the people touting their Reputation/post. If they came here in the early day they got very little rep as the posters has accrued very little rep power. Newbies who came in the later years could have much higher rep/post because there were now a bunch of big fish to dish out more at rep in one dose.
Personally I'd like to be able to tailor how much rep I give to the quality of the post but I don't think it can be done with this software.
R?
