Reputation

Reputation is members rating each other. It gives a board a cheap, member-driven signal of who is worth reading — and, wired to promotions, a way to move people into a group once the community has vouched for them.

/admin/settings?group=reputation holds the four switches. This page is what each is worth, and what turning it on actually changes on a post.

What a rating is

−1, 0 or +1. That is the whole scale, and it is the same for everybody: there is no per-group multiplier, so a moderator's rating counts exactly as much as a new member's. A rating outside that range is refused rather than clamped.

What a group can change is whether its members may rate at all, and how many ratings a day they get. Both live on the group, not here — see Groups.

A rating may carry a comment of up to 500 characters, and may be attached to a particular post or given on the member's profile.

The four settings

Reputation enabled

Off hides every rating control and every total across the board. Existing ratings are kept, so this is reversible: switch it back on and the numbers return exactly as they were. It is a display and enforcement switch, not a delete.

Allow negative ratings

Off — the default — makes reputation a thanks button. Members can say a post helped and nothing else. On, they can rate somebody down as well as up.

Most boards want it off. A downvote is the part of reputation that generates arguments, and a board that only records thanks gets most of the signal with none of the fights.

Require a comment

On, a rating must say why. Off — the default — it need not.

Posts required before rating

A brand-new account cannot rate anybody until it has posted this many times. 5 by default, 0 to switch the requirement off. It is aimed at the throwaway account registered to upvote one post.

The two settings that change what a post shows

This is the part worth reading twice, because two independent switches decide between one-press thanks and a form, and the answer is not obvious from either switch alone.

Two rules produce that table:

• A rating form appears when there is something to choose — a direction, a reason, or both. With negatives off and comments not required there is nothing to fill in, so the board does not ask.
• The Thanks button disappears the moment a comment is required, because one press cannot carry a reason.

So Require a comment is not only a rule about what a rating must contain. It removes the one-click path entirely, and on a board where thanking a good answer should be effortless, that is the cost of turning it on.

Who may rate, and how often

Every rating passes the same checks, in this order:

1. Reputation is enabled board-wide.
2. Nobody rates themselves. Refused outright.
3. The rater's group allows it — the Can give reputation permission.
4. The rater has posted enough, against Posts required before rating.
5. The rating is in range, and is not negative on a board with negatives switched off.
6. A comment is present if one is required, and is within 500 characters.
7. The rater is under their daily allowance.

The daily allowance is a group numeric permission, so it follows the rules every numeric permission follows: the most generous value across a member's groups wins, and 0 means unlimited, not none — see Groups. The day is a UTC day, a fixed window aligned to midnight UTC rather than a per-member calendar.

A member may withdraw a rating they gave.

The totals are counted, not tallied

A member's reputation total is rebuilt with a sum over the live ratings, inside the same transaction as whatever changed them — a new rating, a withdrawal, or an account merge, which recounts every affected account.

It is not a running counter that gets +1ed. That matters to you for one practical reason: the total cannot drift. There is no state to repair, no recount command to run, and a rating that is withdrawn or revised is reflected immediately and exactly. The same approach is used for warning points and for the thread and post counters.

What else reads reputation

Promotion rules. A rule can require a minimum reputation before it moves somebody into a group — see Groups § Promotions. This is the main reason to keep reputation on even if you never show it prominently: it is a measure of standing the community produced itself, rather than one an organiser assigned.

Reputation is imported from MyBB and phpBB boards. A MyBB reputationpower multiplier has no equivalent here and is dropped rather than silently scaling the totals it produced — MyBB parity has the reasoning.