karmaFollow

You've probably seen your post rating go up or down more than your Karma.

Karma determines what your posts will default at for rating. People then have the option to rate your post up or down which will slightly affect your karma for next time. Also, each time you post, you auto-rate yourself at your current karma rating. This has the long term effect of solidifying your rating and, the more posts you have, the harder it is for anyone to permanently move you up or down. Due to the auto-rating thing, people will tend to slowly move up the scale over time.

You need a 3.01+ karama to rate others, if I recall right. The real value of the rating is only apparent if you use the filters. Although if someone made an exceptionally moronic post and everyone rated it down, it'd eventually slip below zero karma and become totally invisible on the topic lists no matter what your setting is.

Edited, Fri Feb 13 11:15:29 2004 by Jophiel

Jophiel pretty much hit the nail on the head with that one. Karma is just the average rating of your posts. The reason is to spare people from having to read and scroll threw posts that sad people decide to put up. It basically filters out garbage.