Davideo7 :

The Trust Point system is broken. They either sometimes very rarely add the trust point to the user or just doesn't do it at all. I feel this is a pressing issue because making someone a Trusted Member will give them more incentive and reason to stay active on the site. Hopefully this issue gets fixed, thanks.

You can bypass the trust point system by becoming staff or elite. I'm technically not a trusted member (-8TP) but I have access to the trusted forum, I just can't give any TP out. I view the Trust Points like the Friends List feature, you can add people to your list or add TP to them but at the end of the day it doesn't really make a difference in site experience. All it does is tells you that you may be more liked then others that is pretty much it. It has very little benefits and I don't think it encourages people to stay active because if you look at the memberlist a majority of highest rated folks are all inactive or gone.

Trust Points should be abolished or based off something else like activity + Contribution Points. I think that people should lose trust if they become inactive but at the same time keep trust based on what they have done on site.

Most people will never ever be trusted unless they somehow encourage someone with TP to give them some. That makes the entire trust system obsolete and abusable. It's been years since I've been able to use it myself so I consider the feature dead and useless to me.

If we are going to fix this feature we need to reconsider how it should work and give it more incentives. The current system has holes in it, it is abusable and the rewards suck.

If you do not think the system is obsolete here is the numbers.

There are 339 trusted members.
There are 602,992 total members.

This means 602,653 people will NEVER EVER use this feature. It is WORTHLESS to them, to me and 99% of vizzed.

JigSaw : Yeah I feel the same way, And last time I checked I was maybe on the side of having a lot of Trust points compared to most. 

The system worked a bit more when there was a bustling community for sure, but it was still basically a popularity thing. And let's be honest most people just asked for them from friends.. Plus there's literally no incentive to give them out. 

I do actually consider giving them out, just as people have said I'm not sure it's even worthwhile. 

I feel the easiest way would be to have it associated with Contribution Points. But unlike CP there's a natural decline of points if users are inactive. Calling it trust points at that point seems silly though.. Perhaps Community points? 

As for rewards perhaps something as simple as a user name font change or even something like a star after the name, its an easy to see indication of active contributing members which gives people the motivation to actually be contributing.. Obviously this system can be abuse like the CP system, but if the two systems are closely tied to each other, wouldn't it be easier to correct/prevent? 

Let me know what you think.. I mean ideas are meant to be scrutinized after all

Sonicmcmuffin : We can't name it Community Points because it has the same abbreviation as Contribution Points, people may get the two confused when one says CP. But I think that a rename is still needed because 99% of Vizzed Community is not "trusted" according to my calculations, only 339 people are out of 600,000 members are trusted right now.

Forget the CP part I mentioned earlier, we should just base it entirely on ones activity. Maybe we can call them Activity Points (AP). Here is how they would work, every day you are active you gain a point, every day your are inactive you lose a point till you hit 0 points. Activity is defined as simply being logged into the site (no posting or actions required).

Then, you would need X amount of Activity Points to gain access to the hidden forums and so on. The more AP points you get the better the rewards.

JigSaw : I did reply to this post prior with a more detailed reply but i fatclicked my mouses back button

I was aware the abbreviation of my idea was stupid as it was the same lol, So obviously AP is far better, i would perhaps suggest that users that post 10 times in one day get 2 activity points, just so that even though it's not hard to launch the site and log in. It awards the users for more than just doing so and stops active users who cant get on the site daily from being stuck at 0 

Sonicmcmuffin : That is an awesome idea! I think 10 posts is too much though and here is why. Only the most active people post in those kind of numbers so they really would not need anymore activity points as they are most likely already very active. If it we lowered to say 1 post it would be better because it would try to encourage people to post that might not post otherwise. I know 1 post is really low but if you think about it it might encourage more people to post, mainly newbies or people who rarely post. No one is going to make 10 posts to make 1 activity point but they "might" do it if the standards were so low that anyone could achieve it with a single post.

JigSaw : That makes sense with the current posting climate for sure. The needed requirement could always be changed anyways so if it does get out of hand it can be quickly reigned in. 

Nice thinking!

Sonicmcmuffin : That is true, we can always change it. Thanks for helping Hopefully we can get it implemented soon. I will be adding your ideas and credit you in the final proposal.

Lexatom : Are you sure you just weren't just giving TP to someone you already gave to? If you give the max to one user and then give more 2 years later it won't count.

Am I the only one that thinks this is a terrible idea? The "trusted" status isn't about how often people log in or how much they post, it's about whether they are a positive or negative influence in the community. Someone can log in and spam every day to get their "activity points" up, that shouldn't give them the privileges that come with being a trusted member, such as access to more mature forums and the ability to create their own layouts with HTML. Someone also shouldn't lose their Trusted status because they haven't logged in for a while. I was gone from this site for 4+ years, I'd be pretty upset if my Trust status was at 0 when I returned despite all I have done for the site.

Additionally, the "339 out of 600,000" number is terribly misleading, because A) that doesn't include people with a rank higher than trusted (real number would be 555), and B) 577,519 of the 603,000 users on Vizzed don't have a single post. Only 25,481 Vizzed users have at least one post, only 5,864 have 10 or more posts, and only 1,856 have at least 50 posts. That means nearly 30% of Vizzed users with at least 50 posts have a rank of Trusted or higher.

Aside from what Lexatom mentioned about the ability to give out trust points being broken, I don't see an issue with the system itself. Despite not having much of an incentive to do so, people still give out TP fairly often to people that deserve it. I know I have given out 2 TP to a large number of members on Vizzed that I trust. If anything, I would say that too many people have the Trusted status, not too few.

To me trust points was always a vizzed milestone something to strive towards status wise and respect wise, back in 2012 I remember working hard posting alot of reviews to work towards getting the 5 trust points needed to become a trusted member honestly there wasn't really alot of differences between trusted members and regular members other than 2 extra forums and the advanced layout editor but back then those two features made all the difference, not to mention trust points and wanting to climb the vizzed user rank ladder also made users become active because they couldn't reach trusted status by themselves so they would post and interact with the larger community in order to get trust points and majority of people though just making quality posts and reviews amount to eventually receiving trust points. But as far as removing the trust point system I'd say no keep it but make it geared more towards promoting activity and inclusion within the community but the system itself was made with that purpose in mind but it ultimately boiled down to a popularity contest over the years...

Overall I'd say leave the trust point system alone being that if you want to obtain trusted member status you have to interact with other members of the board  

tgags123 : First of all, this idea promotes activity on the site so it is far from terrible. It encourages people to be active AND to make a post (if they want to). What do Trust Points do???? NOTHING!!! They don't do a dam thing for this site or a majority of the people on it except divide the masses based on whether you like or hate someone. I think the like and dislike button on posts accomplishes that and more and does a better job of figuring out who is liked or disliked. People should not be held down because they are hated that is just wrong and reason why people leave this community in first place!

I have -8TP so I technically am one of the most hated people here. I have betrayed the trust of many people here including Davideo7 YET I am on staff? Why???? How on earth did this happen when I have -TP? So you see, I am a living example of this broken system. I could leave this site butthurt because I have -TP but I won't because I want to help this site.

EX Palen also mentioned in another thread why TP system is flawed and that is TP are not an accurate representation of someone who is trusted. Many people work hard on this site and go unnoticed by their peers so they never get TP's. TP is just a tool used to decide who you like or hate it does NOT determine if someone is actually trustable. How can you even trust anyone on the internet anyway? I never met anyone on this site why should I trust anyone here and punish them for it? If you don't like someone simply ignore them or go dislike their posts. At least with a ban they can come back with negative TP they cannot. I've been stuck at -8 for years now and never recovered! I don't really care either way because I found a way to bypass the whole system no matter how many negative points I get but maybe other people do care.

You can keep the TP system way it is now but it doesn't do anyone any favors. If you want to fix this site and help promote activity then add activity points. At least those are not a tool to judge someone based on opinion, but facts! Fact whether they are active or not. If you want to continue holding people down and divide people based on opinions then keep rating people with TP's and have a small secret society of 300-500 INACTIVE trusted members.

That is right, most of the entire trusted member userbase is inactive! How on earth does that help this site? Should we trust people who have left us for good? I don't think so. I don't even trust 90% of them as I have no clue who they are but Vizzed says they are trustable and is forcing me to trust them because of someone elses opinion. Don't you see this system is terrible flawed in every possible way imaginable?

I do think that there should be more benefits to being trusted, and that there should be more incentive to give people trust points. As the system is now, there's actually a disincentive, since people rating someone down after you rate them up drains YOUR trust points. Negative and positive trust points should also be capped, so that people can't go so far into the negatives that they can never be trusted again nor can they go so far into the positives that they'll never lose their rank. The system could either be changed significantly or scrapped in favor of something else, but it does need a lot of changing before it's a feature worth using. I personally forgot it even existed most of the time until this thread reminded me of it.

JigSaw : "What do Trust Points do???? NOTHING!!! They don't do a dam thing for this site or a majority of the people on it except divide the masses based on whether you like or hate someone." That is not true at all. When I first joined Vizzed, I remember working my butt off because I wanted to be trusted so bad. I wanted to be able to make my own post layouts, to have a custom profile layout, and to have that dotted underline under my name. I never asked anyone for TP, and I managed to work to get the 5 TP I needed by contributing to the site and being a positive influence. As I contributed more, I got more TP, and I also have out TP to a lot of normal members that I believed deserved Trusted status (goodboy, PixelBrick, PacmanandMariofan to name a few.) The TP system pushed me to not only post a lot and contribute to the site's activity, but also to do so in a positive and meaningful way. It motivated me to not only focus on quantity, but also quality. A system focused only on quantity for determining the trust level of a user is dangerous.

I have no idea why you have -8 TP. I wasn't around when you got banned, and I don't know what you did to deserve it. The only people that can take away TP are staff members though (or people that had previously given you TP) so you must have done something pretty bad to get that many staff members to take TP away from you. It's very possible that, even though you are a staff member, people still don't trust you because of the things you did that resulted in your ban. I don't know, I can't speak for others, and I don't know you well enough to comment on it myself.

As for the people with negative TP getting frustrated and leaving, that's hardly an issue. The only way to get negative TP is for staff members to take more TP away from you than others have given you, and for that to happen you either have to be just really immature and detrimental to the site in general, or have done something really bad that will probably result in a ban anyway. Either way, I wouldn't be concerned with that user leaving, since they were bad for the community anyway. I suppose you're an exception to this, because you were perma banned (and therefore fit into the second category), but came back years later. Many banned users do not have that opportunity, or do not deserve that opportunity.

Most of the entire trusted member base is inactive? Most of Vizzed in general is inactive. There have been 99 users with at least 1 post in the last 30 days. 67 of those 99 people are trusted or higher. That means 68% of the active member base is Trusted or higher. I'd hardly call that "small secret society."

I'd also like to mention that I have lost TP times too. I'm at 23 now, and I've gained a few since then, but there was a time where I lost 3 or 4 TP because I was immature and I was behaving poorly, and I deserved it. There are a few outliers and exceptions, but for the most part, the current TP system works very well. Trusted status is very much attainable for new members, as long as they contribute to the site in a meaningful way.

I have little to say about the proposed system of Activity Points other than that I like the idea, however I see no reason why it would be needed to replace the trust point system. Sure, the trust point system has major flaws, mainly that it can be seriously abused, but so can any other system. Being a trusted member actually means a lot to people who work hard to get that status and have those dots under their username. I know that for my first two years I worked as hard as I could to get up to the 5 Trust Points needed to become trusted, solely because I had a want to be respected. The Trust Point system promotes activity out of people in various ways, not just through activities on the board. I know TONS of trusted members who gain their status primarily through being an avid chatter, being fun to play with in the RGR, quality staff work, or just being a genuine person around the boards. Sure, I agree with having an activity points system, similar to CP, however trust isn’t measured based upon your activity at all, and I think I’m a great person to speak to that.

I’ve been all over the trust point scale, and through every rank up to local mod. Through my first two years here, I fluctuated between having 5 TP and even going all the way down to -4 when I was banned. There was a system that I cared about enough to put in work to try and get my standing higher with the members at the time. Had there just been an activity points system in place through those first two years, I’d have been on the top of the scale. And you know what? That would’ve meant nothing. Trust Points are what got me to be active in the community and got me involved in various things that helped me grow as a person. I am totally against the idea of getting rid of the system, even though it is corrupt and deeply flawed. Being trusted is a privilege for the best of our community, and people who have earned that, shouldn’t have it taken away. People get trust points for good reasons, and it’s asinine to try and take away from the achievements many of us have had. I’ve worked my way up to 13 points, which all mean a lot to me because I know I have a good standing within the community. I know the system doesn’t reflect people accurately, but it’s just a good way to inspire people to be the best they can be.

People who acquire huge amount of trust points deserve to keep them, even if they become inactive. Look at Singelli, she has more trust points than anyone needs, but I feel that’s a good representation for what she meant to our community and how much she impacted our lives. She hasn’t been on in years, however if she did show back up, all of us would greatfully respect those points and honor those who gave them to her. We don’t trust anyone else because they’re inactive, and we shouldn’t degrade what they’ve worked for even in their times of activity.

I'd love to know how many people achieved the trusted status in the last 2 years first of all. 

Most of the active people on the site now have had it for years. Maybe it was a challenge to get trust points especially for those that annoyed the community when they first arrived.. but then there's other users like my best friend Symphonic...I'd be surprised if any of you recall who this person is... I certainly trust them. but they're not active on the site and besides me i doubt anyone is around to trust them in the first place.. as no one else likely remembers anything about them. 

Would i consider them trusted? No.

Trust is what keeps a community together, Activity is what keeps it alive... I'm pretty sure right now the later is the issue.