The purpose of the karma system was to discourage useless or thoughtless posts (gimme code) and also to discourage personal attacks or flames.

If the karma system were used consistently to give positive karma other things would be possible, too: Perhaps searching the forum but only including messages with positive karma so you'd only find the best answers rather than hundreds of posts from the last 5+ years.

The other supposed benefit of karma was to be able to comment anonymously on posts without starting a flame war or litter the forum with the same messages over and over. How many messages in this forum say little more than "Read the datasheet" or "Read the 8051 Bible." If we're not going to answer the question being asked then we should refrain from posting to reduce the number of empty responses. In such a case a bunch of "Didn't Search First" scores and the fact that there's no response to the question should be a pretty good indicator to the original poster that maybe he should do some reading first. Of course, if someone wants to take the time to fully answer the question even though the original poster didn't take the time to do basic research, fine.

I'm starting to see that karma is becoming more of an issue than I thought it would be. While abuse of the karma system is not a good thing because it circumvents the original purpose of karma, worrying about a couple of karma points was not the point of the system either.

I see two options:

1. I may have to develop the "score the score" system where each score assigned to a message will be validated by others. That is, if I score a message as "-1 Offoptic" when the message is clearly not off-topic, perhaps 2 or 3 other members will be given the opportunity to vote on whether my "-1 Offtopic" score was fair. If more than 50% of the users reviewing my score judge it to be unfair, the score will be deleted and I will lose a point of karma for unfairly scoring. Who the 2 or 3 members would be that review a given scoring event would be chosen at random.

2. Nuke the karma system.

I'm not thrilled with either option. I think the karma system has the potential of being useful and has somewhat accomplished its original goals so I'd prefer not to nuke it. On the other hand, I think implementing #1 may be putting too much emphasis on karma and scoring scores rather than staying on the topic of discussing 8052 microcontrollers.

I'm open to suggestions.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster