Way Off-Topic Help! Reputation Whores ;(

[AlexanderT]

People started a new sport in our forum. They seem to be trading reputation points with each other -- the old you gave it to me so now I'll give it to you. While it's certainly fun to see the reputation system in heavy use, some of our more serious (and loyal) members are concerned that the "reputation whoring" was debasing the reputation system itself.

The question is ... what to do against this kind of reputation inflation. On the one hand, we don't want to stop our members from giving each other positive reputation. On the other hand, we want to make sure that those people who deserve the most credit also have it shown in their reputation points. I know the reputation system can be tweaked somewhat, like adjusting the "reputation user spread", but this doesn't really help if the group of people involved in the reputation game is too large.

Another idea was to introduce a new reputation system along with the built-in system that would only award those people who really deserve the award. Some of my members argued that this would only unnecessarily complicate things.

So what to do?

[Zachery]

Increase the spread higher (the number of other users they must first give reputation too before giving back to the same user). Also reduce the number of times they can give per day. This should slow down and prevent it.

You could also threaten that anyone specificly found to be repwhoring to remove all reputation gained.