# Rep bar ups and downs

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### #1 CraigD

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Posted 12 July 2009 - 12:32 PM

You may have noticed that since around Thursday 9 July, your reputation bar – the row of little green (or, hopefully not, red) boxes that appear below your name, post count, and locations in the left margin of your posts – and those of everybody else, were maxed at 5 dim and 6 bright boxes.

This was due to an accidental change to the forum software. It’s fixed now.

We (Hypography’s mods, admins, and dev team staff) also used the fix to update the rep bar generating rules to more accurately display reputation, avoiding the problem of rep bars shooting up past 5 green boxes after a new member gets a single “I approve” from a high-rep member, and many (21, to be precise) high-rep members having maxed out bars.

For many of us, this means that our rep bars are one or two boxes lower than they were a week ago. This doesn’t indicate that your rep has decreased, only that the scale has been adjusted. It also means that, if you now have less than 11 green boxes, you can again gain boxes as you receive the accolades of your fellow hypographers.

### #2 Tormod

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Posted 22 July 2009 - 03:56 PM

Pointless discussion removed.

### #3 Doctordick

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Posted 25 July 2009 - 01:49 PM

Pointless discussion removed.

Perhaps the scale should be exponential as are earthquake, storm measures and sound volume. A much smaller range of boxes could represent a much larger range of approval. I personally think the result would be much more realistic.

Just a comment; worth exactly what you paid for it.

### #4 CraigD

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Posted 26 July 2009 - 10:10 AM

Perhaps the scale should be exponential as are earthquake, storm measures and sound volume. A much smaller range of boxes could represent a much larger range of approval. I personally think the result would be much more realistic.

We've had the same thought, and recoded the site software accordingly.

The reputation bar as we’ve currently set it up is roughly exponential.

The original set up that comes with the vBulletin webforum software hypography uses is linear - its form $n = k \, r$. We discovered a couple of years ago that, as hypography got older, the combination of new and old members made any linear scheme unworkable – either nearly all old members have maxed repbars, or all new members have 1 – and rewrote it to have a rep points threshold for each box. The goal is to have new members get the gratification of seeing their repbar grow by a box or two with one or a few +reps, while leaving at least a few boxes for old members to look forward to getting.

Since we use a simple linear rule to determine how much an “add to xxx’s reputation” gives $r_{\mbox{new}} = r_{\mbox{old}} + k \, r_{\mbox{approver}}$, and since the highest reps grow, we periodically adjust these thresholds, using a rule-of-thumb approach to keep the fraction of people having a given number of reps boxes about the same as then last adjusted. If we wait too long, the rep system begins to look silly, and we’ve a history of waiting too long – we’ll try to better keep on top of it in future, though we’ve said that before.

To discourage treating reputation as a game, we don’t publish the precise reputation $r$ points associated with the number of boxes $n$, and as mentioned above, they’re determined in a rule-of-thumb way, but its rough form is $n = a \log(b\,r^2 +c\,r)$, where $b$ is in the vicinity of -0.5.