What are reputation points?
Reputation points give a rough representation of how trusted a user is on this site. This site has community moderation: rather than moderators having to keep the site clean by themselves, each user is given the ability to do their part. Reputation points are used to measure how experienced you are with our Q&A conventions, and determine the actions you can take. There is little to distinguish between those with a high reputation and the official moderators.
How do I earn points?
The main purpose of this site is asking and answering questions, so points are earned primarily through those actions. Specifically, you earn points in these ways:
- 5 points per up vote on questions you asked
- 10 points per up vote on answers you posted
- 15 points if one of your answers is selected
- 2 points for selecting an answer on your questions
You lose points in these ways:
- -2 points if one of your questions or answers is down voted
- -1 point when you down vote someone else's answer
Note that you do not lose points for voting down questions. The major reason for down voting questions is if the question is a poor fit for this site. (Explanation to come later.) This is a very important process so there is no penalty for doing so. Answers are different, and so to prevent new users from feeling picked on, there is a small penalty for down voting answers.
What actions do reputation points allow?
Once you reach these levels of reputation, you will be able to perform these actions:
- 0 points: Ask and answer questions
- 15 points: Vote up
- 20 points 0 points for the moment: Add comments
- 50 points: Vote down
- 100 points: Edit other people's posts
It may seem strange that some of these actions are restricted because they seem very basic. But the core purpose of this site is Q&A, not to discuss or debate topics. It often takes new users a little bit of time to understand this, so we restrict some of what they can do until they've had some experience on the site. You should vote on answers according to how well they answer the specific question they were posted on, not whether you agree with them in general. The purpose of comments is to clarify questions or to suggest improvements to answers, not argue about the content. So we restrict these things a little so that new users will become familiar with the purpose of the site first.
Note that some of these numbers will be raised once the site is a little more established and we have more high reputation users.
