Blasphemy, I say!

A lot of computer users don’t even think to look at their cookies, or even to remove them. It depends on the site’s audience. For Gaia, the audience is NOT overly computer-saavy. For IP addresses, so what if you link a few wrong accounts together? It’s not issuing a ban. You’re still going to get a lot of accounts correctly linked to the same person.

Because the points can be spent around the site, I’ve kept that statistic private. Only administrators can view everyone’s points, and then each user can only view his own sum.

I’ve certainly considered a karma system, or an option to “Thank” a user for his post, but have never gotten around to implementing such a system. One potential use of it that I can see is to cause posts of lesser quality to appear minimized, i.e., one must click a hyperlink in order to read that post. I believe other web sites such as SlashDot use such a system. Of course, as with the karma system, this too has not been implemented, in part due to the pitfalls you’ve described in your entry.

I must admit, though, that Mac GUI does not see enough “negative” traffic/posting to even warrant me spending the time to implement such a feature, so that’s another reason why I have not.

Another thing you mentioned was disallowing the topic owner, or post author to add himself a point. I think that’s pretty obvious, but there’s also the case of him registering new accounts to do the job. One of the things I’ve read on Gaia is that they’re working on a system (or perhaps they already have it in place?) to connect “mule” accounts to the main account. I think this is mostly done by linking IP addresses, but another way to do it would be to leave a cookie, and then see how many times that cookie gets sent back with other user logins. In any case, linked accounts would receive less points, or in the case of Gaia, gold, and therefore their input into a proposed karma or rating system would matter less than the main account.