Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
I'm one of the people who got a fair amount of unsolicited rep from Silence. He genuinely seemed to be enthusiastic about the rep he gave, but I was surprised by the quantity of rep. He must have been giving rep all over to get around the "you must spread more rep around" limitiation. I got the impression that there were people he wanted to rep, maybe people who would rep him back, and in order to do so he had to spread a lot of rep around to a lot of people in order to get around the rep limitations.
Having said that, when someone gives you a lot of good rep and leaves you encouraging comments, it's natural to want to repay the favour - it becomes a positive feedback loop. Silence may just have been handing out so much rep to so many people, that he simply got back a lot of rep from those who felt they wanted to recipricate.
It's possible there was some organised plan for people to rep each other up as much as possible, but I think it's more likely that Silence simply liked handing out rep all over, and liked the fact that people felt they had to pass that good rep back to him when they had the opportunity. Silence worked hard at spreading rep around, and a lot of that came back to him in spades.
I don't know how or why you could stop such a thing, unless you know it was an organised campaign to break the rep system, or can get inside Silence's head and know that he really didn't mean the rep or the enthusiastic comments he gave, but was merely participating for selfish reasons.
I have to say I totally agree.
Yes, sometimes he goes overboard with his rants (mostly in RPSC) but I believe he genuinely acted in good faith when using reputation controls. In fact, IIRC, he was enthusiastic about this feature when it was enabled and, as dave said at the time, it was our job (the board members) to make the system work to its fullest so he was just playing his part.
He was so serious about this, being one of the most participating members, that he flipped out when the post count rules changed, slashing his hard-earned proof of commitment to the forum. I didn't care when it happened even though I halved my post count, but then again, I don't put out so much energy in the forum as he did.
I don't recall ever using reputation (I might have sparingly, I just don't remember) since I feel it's useless and fuel for trolling. The reputation is earned, not given. Geo, digi, and john reynolds don't need those blinding green dots for me to remember their names and tag them with "good" or "bad" posting habits, and Russ wouldn't deserve all the red dots in the world for me to acknowledge I don't agree with him for the most part because I've never seen him trolling and/or disturbing the normal flow of discussion (maybe he's just a bit stubburn, but that's it
.
As I said before, reputation and post will always be a flawed metric from where we can measure merit, and this becomes even clearer when we realise this is a 3d tech forum, not a popularity contest where people that expose themselves more have bigger ratings.
Or.... you could do it as I do and ignore this completely (I'd turn it off if I could
).