Due to some comments and suggestions made in this thread as well as email I have received over the last few months I went ahead and did something that I hadn't done and hoped wouldn't be necessary: I wrote a script that goes through the entire scoring history database and presents me with following information:

1. A list of everyone that has had a message scored positively or negatively and a sublist that shows each instance of someone scoring that user. A concentration of the same user in the sublist would indicate that that user is receiving a lot of attention from the user in question.

2. A list of everyone who has scored messages and a sublist for each user that shows each instance of them scoring other users. Again, a concentration of any user in the sublist would indicate that the user in the sublist is receiving a lot of attention from the user in question.

3. When showing each user's vote history, it also shows the balance of their votes. This shows me whether each user is generally assigning positive karma to users, generally assigning negative karma, or is balanced (resulting in a near-zero total).

Having reviewed this information I see no pattern of favoritism or intentionally nuking someone else's karma--with one exception. There is one user that DOES seem to be abusing the karma system and I will contact this person via email. Other than this one exception, I see pretty much all users (long-time as well as new) scoring each other positively AND negatively. I see no evidence of any group of users consistently giving themselves karma or avoiding giving each other negative karma when appropriate.

In short, with one exception, the karma system is not being abused. It seems the main question is how we can make the karma system more useful and but it wouldn't appear that there is any need to display score histories for each user, etc. because that would violate anonymity that I think is useful for scoring and, more importantly, there is no indication of any general abuse of the system.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster