Good Afternoon Everyone.

Thank you for contributing plenty of food for thought for us to consider. It is fall and the investing season is getting back into gear so we anticipate and are looking forward to interacting with our forum leaders and our forum participants in the fall.

Quite a lot of issues have been touched upon in this thread and based on what I am permitted to say, I would like to offer AGORACOM's opinion on each below.

1) Voting Restrictions on Mail Room members: - This is an excellent idea and we would like to code it into our site. However this won't eliminate the constant fluctuation of anyone's rating.

Users can change their vote at any time (from a 5 to a 3 lets say) from time to time you will experience a fluctuation in your rating. While this might come across as upsetting, it's not an indication of your contributions to the forum. Rest assured that if you appear in the Hub Leader box you are in the upper echelon of a community of 1.3 million and that alone is an amazing feat.

From my perspective I also would have a restriction on how many votes a Mail Room user can post. There is a notification tool that notifies an admin when any member submits a sequence of the same vote (e.g. 5x 1 stars, or 5x 3 stars or 5x 5 stars). Either way this is a useful tool for members of staff to fight and to a great extent eliminate vote rigging.

And as per our Updates during the summer, one's rating play's a significant role in attaining and keeping a high rank within AGORACOM.

One suggestion I often extend to members is to always change your vote. Here is a hypothetical scenario for your consideration:

If X user with a rating of 3.4 and is an otherwise OK guy starts using profanity in posts, or begins bickering with other members, you can change your 5 or your 4 star vote to a 1 star during these instances. As a consequence, a once respectable poster (X user) will loose their President and Vice President Rank sequentially to Treasurer, unless X user aligns himself with the limits you as a community continue to set.

It might sound as inproper, as many user's don't feel comfortable casting a negative vote, however these are tools we have extended to the community and are important to the self moderation and preservation of this investment eco system.

In conclusion, yes we are looking into imposing a maximum vote restriction for mail room users (presently, 20 votes for as long as one is in the mail room).

2) Realigning the Point System: - We have considered bumping up the Threshold to attain a higher rank within AGORACOM, however since one must carry a high rating in addition to ones activity points, raising the ranking point threshold wouldn't bring forth the desired outcome.

In stead since rating plays a more significant role one's rank, we encourage our members to keep how they rate others fresh. This way an disruptive member who has gone from Hyde to Jeckyl won't stay in the VP or P column for too long.

3) Question from Fastfoot in Suggestions for altering the Ranking Systems

Delete the rankings given by any person who has been banned from a given Agoracom Forum in which they have been active.

Thank you aitakahashi for answering this inquiry.

I would like to add that this is always the case; and once their activities sans their post are deleted they cannot be restored.

The only thing that is kept cahced is a user's Activity Points and the banned user's member rating. This is kept as a temporary measure as we are considering adopting a suspension application.

4) Suspended instead of Banned

We are working on a three strikes and out system. This would entail a warning; a temporary ban (48 hours), a week long ban followed by a permanent ban. We are still working on the technicalities as well as the thresholds. Feel free to contribute your opinions on this matter by posting your responses on this forum.

5) Empowering Presidents to move postings from NOT Main Forum to OT Forum

At the present time this ability is still work in progress. We need to ensure that by introducing this code into our system, no other function of our site is disrupted. If the application is too big, then once the development is complete, the new functions are parked and are launched during bigger upgrades. Typically, AGORACOM undergoes a big upgrade every 4 to 6 months.

6) iPhone or Smartphone ap

We hope to be in a position to launch an AGORACOM app in the ever evolving world of mobile communications.

I hope this answers your inquiries. If you have any more comments, feedback or suggestions, we are always looking forward to seeing them posted here.

Thank you all again for thoughts, your feedback and for your contributions to the AGORACOM Community.

Kind Regards,

Andreas Marouchos

Community Director