Hallo Kiran,

you wrote:

1a. On "edaboard" forum, each post by any member is given 2 points.
Result of implementing this part on our forum will be that members will feel to give more and more posts. This might include some useless posts just for gaining points. But due to our voting systems these points can be compensated by voting negative points to such posts.

I don't think that this will work. If there are people being eager to gain Karma points, then they will tend to make more and more rather useless posts. Another trick is to split their posts or to produce echoes of already given posts, only slightly changing them. The result is a sheer enormeous flood of rather useless posts and scrolling through them can be very nasty...

My suggestion: for each download from our forum you can rate negative points. This might help our forum to keep track of Leeches (people who visit forums only for downloads, some months back somebody mentioned these people as leeches, this term fits perfectly for such people).

If my real intention is to help, then it's a pleasure for me when as many as possible people recieve my help and is of benefit for them! And by the way, I'm also a leecher, every time I download a datasheet, every time I download a tool for programming, coding, debugging, etc.

In my college days I had a friend named Raghunathan, he is slim, dark coloured, wearing glasses, and had a moustache like as if it was drawn with a sharp pointed pencil. And believe me I used to have this picture in mind whenever I read Raghunathans posts.

I like Raghunathan from his humour, from his accurate and professional way analyzing problems, from his eagerness to learn new things and from his permanent willing to help people. And this isn't influenced by the fact whether he is wearing classes or not...

What I want to tell is, the anonymity can be very helpful to get to know people from how they act, not from how they look like.

We should remember what this forum is mainly for: To help people and to discuss '51 related problems. And the rules and etiquettes are only necessary to make this forum work. Because of this, list of rules should be as short as possible.

These Karma points have an advantageous effect: It's possible to critisize a post without offending the contributor. But I noticed also a disadvantageous effect: Members having similar Karma levels tend to become competitors, not being willed to give a positive Karma point even if post was excellent. I don't like this aspect. I would like to prefer to think, that we all are members of a big family...

Kai