What Is The "Rating"

A member's rating is the average rating (from 1-5) received from fellow members of the community. It is a good indicator of a member's value to the community.

What Are "Activity Points"

Members are credited with points related to their activity on AGORACOM. Points can be earned and lost for a plethora of activities around the site. The more positive contributions you make to the AGORACOM community, the more activity points you will earn.

Why Are These Important?

They are important because the combination of these two metrics will determine your rank within the AGORACOM community. Your rank determines which functions you can perform within AGORACOM, which includes the ability to do things such as delete offending messages, delete offending members, update vital company information in real-time – and many more cool things.

What Is "Your Vote"

Your vote is the rating you have given to a specific member. It is combined with all votes from the community to determine a member’s average rating. You can change your vote at any given time if you feel the member has become more or less valuable to the community. All votes are anonymous, so be responsible with your votes as it will impact the quality of your community in the future. Cast your vote based on quality of information, not the buddy system. You can not vote for yourself.

What Is the Purpose Of All This?

Great question. In order to build a massive small-cap community without losing control and sacrificing quality on hundreds of discussion forums, we are going to put control in the hands of those who are best able to utilize it – You! To do this in a fair and democratic fashion, members will be given different levels of responsibility based on authority levels achieved within the community.

About the IP Check Tool

The IP Check tool lists all users who have last logged in from the same IP address as the message poster.

Two usernames who consistently show up together in the IP check tool could be one person with two users in the system, it could be two different people sharing a computer, or office network. It does not constitute a violation but is simply additional information that members can use in assessing the credibility of a post.

A user's IP address represents how they have connected to the internet and may change from time to time if they log in from different locations such as home, work, or a cafe. A notebook computer typically changes IP addresses as it connects to different Wi-Fi networks. Many DSL and cable service providers also choose to rotate the IP addresses used by their customers from time to time for various reasons.

It is also common for IP addresses are shared between multiple computers such as on an office network, a Wi-Fi enabled cafe or hotel, and most smart-phones. As such, an IP address by itself cannot be used to positively identify a specific user.

In order to preserve the privacy of our users, the IP address is not being displayed, however AGORACOM is running a query which will identify all users who's last login IP matches that of the message poster.