Reputation is an extremely important part of any community, and online communities are no exception. In fact in the case of online communities reputation is arguably more important since it is that much easer to hide your identity online. A good example of an online community with an explicit reputation management system is ebay. After each transaction on ebay the participants can rate the other party, and over time this creates a reputation for each buyer and seller. Having a good reputation becomes an important asset, and creates a strong incentive for buyers and sellers to treat each other fairly. Here is an extract from the site:

Whether you are new to eBay or an established member, your reputation is arguably the most valuable asset you have. Your “reputation” is based in part on how long you have been a member (this mostly applies to members who have had their accounts or user IDs for less than 30 days), but more importantly, your feedback score. The feedback you receive and leave for others can speak volumes for or against you, and understanding exactly what those numbers and percentages mean can save you a lot of time and trouble.

Of course, there will always be people that try and game the system, and ebay probably spends a large amount of time and effort trying to prevent this. Overall, however, there is no doubt that ebay would be far worse off without a reputation management system. And you could argue that without a good reputation management system ebay would not be sustainable.

There are many different aspects of reputation management that can be applied to online communities, and in this article I want to touch on just one of these that we will be implementing shortly. For many of our products we allow members to upload pictures, and we then moderate these to make sure that all public pictures are family safe before they can be viewed by other members. The most fail safe way to do this is still very manual, with a real human being scanning the photos and then approving or rejecting each one. What we found, however, was that most of the time moderation was not necessary, but that we still had to do it just in case. As the volume of pictures increased, so the time taken to review them increased as well which means our service to loyal members was getting worse because of a small number of cases where someone would break the rules. So we came up with a system where we could score each members conduct when it came to adding pictures in the past, and then use this score to determine whether a new picture needed to be reviewed before it would be made live. Members with a good reputation would have their pictures go live immediately (thereby providing them with a benefit for their good behaviour). Members with insufficient history would have their pictures reviewed until such time as their reputation score reached a particular level. And members with a very poor reputation score would have their pictures made private until such time as they could be reviewed, or could even be deleted until such time as their reputation improved. This feature only goes live in the next few days, but we expect that it will help reduce the moderation load significantly, and at the same time will help us to give a better service to those members that deserve it.