Whenever someone rates a post either x reputations points is subtracted or added to the reputation total. That x is called reputation altering power. So when a 2 year old member rates someone it has more influence then a new user rating the same post.
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Say you start with 1 point.
When you alter the reputation of someone else, you will give +1 or -1.
Say you won an altering point.
When you alter the reputation of someone else, you will give +2 or -2.
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Everyone starts out with 10 points as does a new person registering. But many people had several hundred or more posts and some have been around for a while. So - they get a number which they can see in their profile. The number in the profile is the Reputation level (as opposed to their Reputation Altering number).
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Reputation Point Factor
For every X points of reputation, users gain 1 point of reputation-altering power.
So - if a user has 300 'points' in their 'reputation' (the number that shows in their profile) they have a second number which is their 'reputation altering' power (and this is different from their 'reputation' points).
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- Everyone has a reputation = total of reputation : it is your points of reputation, and it starts at 10.
- Everyone has a reputation power = altering power : it is how much you can affect other's reputation (adding or subtracting), and it starts at 0 or 1, and can only grow with register date, post count and reputation.
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First the easy one, putting 0 for any of the factors, will effectively disable that factor from having any effect on reputation power (how much a user gives and takes). Also, giving negative reputation only takes 1/2 of what positive would give, the value you see listed when you edit a user in the admin cp.
As for the dots, there is no chart for this since normally a user isn't supposed to actually know what a series of dots translates to in numeric terms. Just that bright green dots are better than dark green dots and the more dots you have, the higher the reputation. Having any bright dots at all means you have a higher reputation than someone who only has dark green dots. Same thing with the red dots, just in reverse.
The maximum number of dots you will see is 11 (in the current system).
Reputation
-99 to 0
0 to 99
100 to 199
200 to 299
300 to 399
400 to 499
Once you hit 500, you will start gaining bright green dots on top of the 5 dark dots but it takes twice as much to gain a bright green dot.
500 to 699
700 to 899
900 to 1099
1100 to 1299
1300 to 1499
1500 and up
Negative values work pretty much the same way except it shows balanced (grey dot) from -99 to 0. I've just changed the code to only show balanced if your reputation is 0, less than 0 and it will show red dots. Some other things that I will be adding will be for you to be able to alter how often the dots show up so you can better adjust the system if you expect to have high or low reputation values.
