ThePsychoticOne the Prohpet wrote:
Custom titles are awarded by admins to people with 10k posts.
You used to be able to see your karma, but people complained too much when they got rated down, so that was removed years ago. You can still figure it out by rating yourself in specific combinations (you can rate your own posts, or anyone elses, an infinite amount of times in your own journal, so that's easy enough) and seeing if you're at sub default, default, decent, etc. For example, rating me up 2x gets me excellent, but i'm not scholar yet, so my karma score must be between 3.00 and 3.01. Typically it's not quite that simple, and will require some math to find a way to narrow it down to within .01, but it's always pretty easy to get an estimate. For example, if one rateup gets you excellent, then you know you're above 4.5*3=13.5, 13.5-6=7.5, 7.5/2=3.75. Of course >3.75 isn't a very specific number, and would require a few other combinations of ratings to narrow it down to a more exact range, but it'll give you a quick idea of what you're at.
edit: for the titles, if you mean below the name, that's the 10k title (ie One flew over the cukcoo's next for me), if it's part of the name (ie the prohpet), that's a premium feature.
Thanks to two hours worth of SCIENCE with jinte (who's karma should be between 3.43~3.46), i notice some of this is actually wrong.
Every third rate down is actually -2, not -1 (idk how i remembered that wrong), which has been said by kao before.
Also, more importantly, self rate downs are ALWAYS 1, and never -2. This is clearly seen by needing more rate downs to drop yourself to sub default than it takes others to do. Also obvious because it's impossible to rate yourself down to unrated.
Otherwise, yeah, anyone with a journal and a few hours of free time can figure out their karma, or at least a range it can fall in (finding an exact value is going to be insanely hard, and probably take a series of 100-200+ rates to find one where you can tell exactly which decimal it ends in. We got really lucky with jinte getting such a small range. We had it narrowed down to 3.22~3.45, and then using 23 rate downs followed by 2 rate ups just happened to put the cutoff at 3.42, which sub-D being lower, and default being higher, and we just happened to get default, otherwise we'd have been left with a far larger range).
Edited, Sep 30th 2010 5:02am by ThePsychoticOne