What is karma?
Karma is a number that appears in your profile and is visible only to moderators. At the very beginning every member of MOTL has karma 0. If you get a warning because of violating the posting rules, offending people etc. you get negative karma. (In some cases it can be more than -1 for a single violation, but normally it's just -1). On the other hand you can get positive karma for making good suggestions, helping the mods to do their work etc.

How does karma work?
As I said above you can get positive and negative karma for showing good or bad behaviour on the boards. If you get a warning you'll be told that you lost karma, if you got positive karma you will most likely not get a message. (Because telling people that they got positive karma could lead to abuse) The karma does not influence your 'normal trading life' at MOTL, no one other than a mod can see your karma, so no one will say: 'I don't trade with you, you have negative karma…' What the karma does is: If you get quite a few warnings and your karma reaches -5 you'll be auto-banned. This sounds strict, but this banning will in some cases only be temporary, what means you get a second chance and you can return after a certain amount of time if you show a better behaviour afterwards. In addition: remember that even with a karma -4 you can use MOTL as normal, it always depends on YOU if you get banned or not.

Isn't the system to strict?
This is what many new users say about karma. But they're two things disproving this statement.
At first, you have to consider this: Before there was karma, you got one warning and the next violation lead to banning. Now you get four warnings before being banned and that's quite fair.
In addition no one will get a warning and his topic closed if he has 4 ***'s or +++'s in a row. The mods enforce the SPIRIT of the rules, NOT THEIR EXACT WORDING. You will get a warning if there is more than one violation in your topic but not for a small mistake.
At the very beginning of the using of the new system the mods really closed every topic with only a small violation but they've realized that this is too strict because it could also be an oversight of the poster.

So in fact the karma system isn't that strict as many people claimed it to be. There have to be rules to avoid ugly posts and there has to be a system to punish violators, but also to give them the chance to make good their mistakes. And that's exactly what karma is.

Always remember, it depends on you if you get warnings or not and you can always get positive karma/a second chance by showing good behaviour and using common sense.

That's it for now,
Thanks for your time,

Christoph

Btw, to all those people how want to see their karma in their profile:
This isn't a good idea, because there would be quite a few people out there thinking: 'Hey, I have karma +1, so there is no risk for me to get banned!' And while thinking this they'll probably use more punctuation marks than it is allowed or up their post more than once a day just because of knowing about their karma.

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Posted by Christoph, the trader in Germany with the most refs

quote:

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Originally posted by Christoph:
This sounds strict, but this banning will in most cases only be temporary, what means you get a second chance and you can return after a certain amount of time.

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This is not true, most people are not unbanned. I thought I made that clear in an earlier post.

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Posted by Christoph, the trader in Germany with the most refs