Removing it won't stop elitism anyway, and thus serves no purpose.
:colbert:
I joined in 2005 and I find this outrageous. Narcissism runs deep in my veins.
You people would've hated Smartness (which I quite personally loved, fuck this rating system), the "Thanks" system (think the "Like" system on Facebook. Pretty much identical), and the classic ratings system where rating were cataloged and the totals for all were publicly displayed right next to your user name (you had an icon next to your username representing your highest rating, in my case the agree check mark, which when clicked opened a box that displayed your total rating for each rating). I had thousands of agree, about a thousand useful, then about eight hundred disagrees, the rest were just a jumble.
The one time the avatar thing is actually perfect you want to take it away? All it's missing is saved ratings but I can see why that's gone. Either way that's what makes a forum attractive. I come here in order to be a regular. In order to be seen as one of the old members. Take that away and it stops being fun.
The original smartness system basically worked like this:
Every new member was allotted 5000 smartness points. To make a thread, you had to have 5010 smartness. You earned smartness by posting. You might say that this would cause spamming. The problem there was that each spelling mistake, grammatical error, or generally stupid phrasing made you lose smartness. The first mistake was 14 points, then 28 points, then 56, then 112, 224, and so on. Each mistake doubled the total subtracted. Generally, each mistake was [highlight][u]highlighted and underlined like this[/u][/highlight] and a box in the top right appeared saying exactly how many points were lost and a link was provided to a page informing on the most common mistakes. Occasionally, a mistake wasn't highlighted, but that meant the problem was something like no punctuation, no capital letters, or the like. If you corrected every mistake, not only were the missing smartness restored, but you got the point for posting as well. For a short time, you would get an additional point for correcting the mistakes, but it went away very quickly.
Now, roughly every six hours, the "Autoban" system would find the user with the lowest smartness and ban them for a week and reset their smartness to 5000. Then there was the "Instaban" system. Things like racial slurs, memes, and saying Garry's home address meant an automatic week ban. But, if someone made a post that lost so many smartness, that it lost over 5000 smartness alone, the Instaban system would, as the name suggests, instantly ban them, but for 900 days. Let me tell you, having this happen sucks. It was a good reason to check your posts if you copied something from elsewhere. You may be the best poster ever, but because something you pasted was terribly spelled, you lost over 5000 points and were banned. I made this mistake on an old account and was banned for 900 days. Fortunately, you were allowed to create an alt as long as your previous account wasn't PERMANENTLY banned, which mine wasn't. That's how I ended up with this one, my old one was a November 05 account. To be honest though, you usually never had to worry about more than a year, because Garry had a habit of unbanning everyone on his Birthday. This doesn't happen anymore because there are too many people Garry wants to stay banned and would be hard pressed to reban.
So yeah, that's a fairly brief history of the smartness system and its associated parts. There was also the "Regiban" system, which automatically banned accounts with certain usernames, email accounts, and IP addresses. This system has also been removed. Autoban and Instaban also had other functions, but those were what they were most known for.
[QUOTE=Zeddy;19458938]The original smartness system basically worked like this:
Every new member was allotted 5000 smartness points. To make a thread, you had to have 5010 smartness. You earned smartness by posting. You might say that this would cause spamming. The problem there was that each spelling mistake, grammatical error, or generally stupid phrasing made you lose smartness. The first mistake was 14 points, then 28 points, then 56, then 112, 224, and so on. Each mistake doubled the total subtracted. Generally, each mistake was [highlight][u]highlighted and underlined like this[/u][/highlight] and a box in the top right appeared saying exactly how many points were lost and a link was provided to a page informing on the most common mistakes. Occasionally, a mistake wasn't highlighted, but that meant the problem was something like no punctuation, no capital letters, or the like. If you corrected every mistake, not only were the missing smartness restored, but you got the point for posting as well. For a short time, you would get an additional point for correcting the mistakes, but it went away very quickly.
Now, roughly every six hours, the "Autoban" system would find the user with the lowest smartness and ban them for a week and reset their smartness to 5000. Then there was the "Instaban" system. Things like racial slurs, memes, and saying Garry's home address meant an automatic week ban. But, if someone made a post that lost so many smartness, that it lost over 5000 smartness alone, the Instaban system would, as the name suggests, instantly ban them, but for 900 days. Let me tell you, having this happen sucks. It was a good reason to check your posts if you copied something from elsewhere. You may be the best poster ever, but because something you pasted was terribly spelled, you lost over 5000 points and were banned. I made this mistake on an old account and was banned for 900 days. Fortunately, you were allowed to create an alt as long as your previous account wasn't PERMANENTLY banned, which mine wasn't. That's how I ended up with this one, my old one was a November 05 account. To be honest though, you usually never had to worry about more than a year, because Garry had a habit of unbanning everyone on his Birthday. This doesn't happen anymore because there are too many people Garry wants to stay banned and would be hard pressed to reban.
So yeah, that's a fairly brief history of the smartness system and its associated parts. There was also the "Regiban" system, which automatically banned accounts with certain usernames, email accounts, and IP addresses. This system has also been removed. Autoban and Instaban also had other functions, but those were what they were most known for.[/QUOTE]
Don't think anyone showed any interest but ok.
[QUOTE=Kannon;19458975]Don't think anyone showed any interest but ok.[/QUOTE]
People were asking, no one gave a very definite or accurate answer, so I did. I've got nothing else to do right now. Figured I'd help out.
If we include post count towards a member's reputation then all posts in the Fast Threads should be nullified.
The problem with the "smartness" system is that it was too complicated from the looks of it. Wouldn't it be better if it just counted off for spelling, and instead of banning you, restricting you to a forum? :/
I liked FP better when it had smartness and it recorded what you got rated.
Sounds like the smartness system was useful. Why was it removed then?
If you know someone's join date you know the person's minimum age. The youngest people join this site (excluding alts) at like 13 so if you see an early '07er you'll know they'll be at least 16.
[QUOTE=nicatronTg;19459092]The problem with the "smartness" system is that it was too complicated from the looks of it. Wouldn't it be better if it just counted off for spelling, and instead of banning you, restricting you to a forum? :/[/QUOTE]
Not really no. It was to teach people. If you did not learn, you were punished. It was a great way to cull idiots. Just counting off does nothing. Its like taking a test, failing, but the grade having no effect on your overall grade. What have they learned?
[QUOTE=MotherMinge;19455656]
By the way, if you say "no", PLEASE do say why. One-liner responses, while funny to you, do nothing to convince the person you're responding to.[/QUOTE]
no
[QUOTE=MotherMinge;19455656]I could go on and on about why I think this would be good for the community, but basically everyone already knows. We have a significant portion of the members of this forum deciding that someone is intelligent or brain-dead based more on the little number under their avatar than the content of their posts. If we were to remove the date from the avatar, or, heck, the user CP entirely (along with the posts/day number, because I'm sure someone would write a greasemonkey script that synthesizes join date from posts & posts/day), we just might be able to make Facepunch a better, less rude community.
By the way, if you say "no", PLEASE do say why. One-liner responses, while funny to you, do nothing to convince the person you're responding to.[/QUOTE]
There's no point. We don't read an intelligent post then say, oh that guy's an 09er, fuck what I just read. If it's a shit post, then we think that. Kind of like this one.
butts
I agree with above
It's really quite fine the way it is, if people troll anyway they just get flamed or otherwise until they leave. The community pretty well solves all of its problems by its self.
1) But then how do we know who's smart and who's stupid?
2) Someone would just make a greasemonkey script that would stress the fuck out of FP's servers by going through everyone's profiles and adding the date, which would in turn make FP slower.
The new people need to be put in their place, because many of them just post shit.
Goddamn I wish we could go back to the old enforced spelling + smartness setup. It really made even the dumbest of people at least OCCASIONALLY try to write legible posts.
But don't remove the join dates... That's practically the last remaining 'Retard Detector' mechanism active on this site.
PETITION: ban for crappy petitions
[QUOTE=hehe;19459721]Sounds like the smartness system was useful. Why was it removed then?[/QUOTE]
vbullshit upgrade made the addon incompatible
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