Can no longer award Karma for anyone?

[MajorFubar]

Seems I am no longer able to award Karma for anyone, positive or otherwise (though I never left negative karma except for some people posting unjustified 'hate' posts). Has the feature been disabled? If so, there's probably no point showing folk's Karma ratings any more, especially newbies because it's never going to be anything other than zero.

[megamarkd]

I have feeling it was broken when some forum issues were addressed earlier this year.  It does seem silly to continue displaying karma count considering it's currently non-functioning.  Perhaps there are plans to reactivate it?  Who knows

[MajorFubar]

Thanks for replying, I was wondering whether it was just a problem with my account.

Maybe they've taken the conscious decision to just disable it. On the face of it, it's a good feature, but on every forum I've ever been on, it quickly becomes a victim of human nature. If you express an opinion someone disagrees with, they'll happily smite you before they next take a breath, whereas maybe 1-in-10 (or less) people who agree with you, or whom you have helped, will ever hit the thanks button.

It's the same reason why I'm always wary of product ratings on sites such as Amazon etc. It's common nature that disappointed purchasers are about a thousand times more likely to be looking for somewhere to leave a damning 1-star review than satisfied customers leaving a 5-star review.

[LBH]

The karma function is imho useless. I think the function should be removed.

No one knows, if you got karma for negative or positive help and inputs and so on.
The numbers of karmas does'nt tell how helpful you are, or about the quality of your help, or about how many things you have helped with and so on. A negative number does'nt even tell anything you can use. Why give negative Karma at all?
Karma from one topic does'nt tell anything for another topic.

And yes - some people use it for personal dislikes and such too. That's not useful at all. It's not professionally and objectively, and therefor no help at all.

A help forum should mainly be about help, and the karma function is no help at all, and can even be the opposite. Beside that a forum is also about discussions and ideas and critique, but why use karma in those threads at all, as it only can be used to like or dislike a comment or idea. It does'nt tell anything of any use.
Unfortunately no one can guarantee the Karma is about positive help or attempt to help to solve a users issue only.

Some get addictive to get positive votes, and is very annoyed by negative votes. And that can affect someone in very bad ways, especially as noone can see who voted and about what. That's it. I don't like it, and i can't see any point in having it in a forum like this.
If anyone wan't to give some kind of feedback to anyone, then they can write it in a post in the topic it's about. Then everyone can judge that for them self.

The Karma function has allready been broken some times, so we are some that lost karma and that perhaps more than one time, so you can't count on the numbers anyway. - (A short while ago i think i lost about 15 karma votes from one day to another under website maintenance, so my count is wrong, just to give an example.) - And even if the numbers was correct, then you can't use the vote numbers for anything useful anyway.

What is the Karma function good for?

[megamarkd]

I have to agree with you LBH, karma tends to add nothing. I've seen "karma wars" erupt on other forums in the past when it's been introduced. Post content is also affected by karma in that a member may change what they would say or not post at all for fear of bad karma or in a endeavour to gain good karma. Then there are the folks who for some reason make it their mission to get the most bad karma on the forum and all the harm such efforts to achieve that status creates. Facebook and YouTube are good examples of karma-driven societies though they don't have moderators to stem fall out from karma wars (but I'm dead sure the alliances and "like/dislike squads" still exist).

[MajorFubar]

The Karma function has allready been broken some times, so we are some that lost karma and that perhaps more than one time, so you can't count on the numbers anyway. - (A short while ago i think i lost about 15 karma votes from one day to another under website maintenance, so my count is wrong, just to give an example.) - And even if the numbers was correct, then you can't use the vote numbers for anything useful anyway.

Funny you should mention that...I was at 20-odd once, then went down to 1 overnight, since then I've gained 3.
In any case I agree with all the points you raised. I would award you karma for your useful post, but hey, I guess I can't