Ok, I know what karma is - for modding comments up or down score-wise, or for applying tags like "informative" to the post. Well, I think that's what it's for anyway. Not being particularly karma-savvy, how the heck do I use my 50 points here on use.perl?
Re:good for nothing
djberg96 on 2003-09-16T18:37:13
Ok, but how do I spend the points? That's what I don't get.Re:good for nothing
vsergu on 2003-09-16T18:54:43
You don't spend them. They're just an indication that you've posted a lot of comments that other people find worthwhile, and thus you can be assumed to be unlikely to engage in trollish behavior.
You lose them if you post things other people mod down, but that's not normally something you'd do intentionally.Re:good for nothing
jordan on 2003-09-16T20:23:02
- You don't spend them.
Actually, they used to have a problem on/. with people building up huge karma values and then trolling the place unmercifully using their automatic +1 karma boost. This not only allowed some of their nastier trolls to get wide distribution, but made people spend mod points in pushing them back down.
Thus, the Karma cap was born. Now, your Karma tops out at 50.
Re:good for nothing
Elian on 2003-09-16T20:29:21
On use.perl, or any other generally well-behaved slash site, you don't--the points are a mostly meaningless indicator of the length of time you've hung around. They're only useful on slash sites populated by a more typical-of-/. crowd, where low karma marks people as trolls or going against the conventional wisdom, and high karma gives automatic extra points to stuff you write.Re:good for nothing
jordan on 2003-09-17T00:42:39
Yeah.
Probably the biggest reason there is Karma and moderation on use.perl is so Pudge can use it to test Slashcode features relating to it.
Re:Simply Go To Your Nearest Karma Redemption Cent
djberg96 on 2003-09-16T19:17:24
Drat, and I was hoping to use them to buy titles from O'Reilly & Associates.
Check the FAQs on slashdot; some specifics are different than use Perl;, but in general the principles are the same.
Basically, Karma is just a rating of what quality comments you produce. The only real thing you get out of it is the +1 bonus at 25 points.
OTOH, moderation points are awarded periodically to most users who've been around any length of time and don't have excessively negative karma. You get a couple of days to spend these moderating things up and down. Read the moderation FAQs on slashdot for details.
Spend some time around slashdot reading and commenting, and you'll start to get the idea. You're a hacker; play with all the various settings and controls.
