Firstly, this is not a post describing how we will solve the rating/reputation system. That is still an ongoing process that will require further discussion internally, with the mods and with the general community. We invite you to continue to leave your thoughts/suggestions and responses to the ongoing discussion taking place in this forum thread. I implore you to take the time to read it fully as a good number of various ideas and reasons have already been presented and you may only need to go around liking certain posts you agree with.

While talk continues about changes to the website, it's also rather important that we find a few dedicated volunteers who would be willing to help us make these changes. We've stated previously on numerous occasions that our reasons for choosing IPB included the ability to remain free of having to maintain a complete set of software ourselves and instead dedicate time to adding features and services to the website. This also meant that we would attempt, as much as possible, to leverage the existing capabilities of the software to our needs. Included here is the post ratings and user reputation system. Obviously the system is designed by IPS to be as generally-applicable as possible as they provide this software to a very wide range of clients.

After a few months of trying out various things with the default system, it's become clear that we're going to need some of our own solutions as well. To enable a client to tweak the various software features to suit their needs, IPS provides a hooks system - other similar ideas would be plugins or extensions that you find for applications and browsers. What this means is we can tweak various aspects of the forum software and still retain the support of changes made to the IPB back-end through various version updates. This is largely preferable to modifications, changes being made to the actual base code of the IPS software that could be rendered completely obsolete and/or overwritten with even a minor version update, thus requiring more maintenance.

It's been evidenced time and again that members here are very dedicated and committed to seeing changes being made for certain things - fortunately for us, this community is also largely made up of talented developers who could, given access and resources, actually implement these changes themselves. If you think that's you, drop me an email at [email="dsikora@gamedev.net"]dsikora@gamedev.net[/email] so I can talk with you directly. Again, this is a call for volunteer developers - which means you will initially not be compensated for your work other than having the warm fuzzy feeling of helping make GDNet a better place and of course a free subscription to GDNet+ for the duration of your volunteer work. However there's no reason why your initial volunteer work can't transition into a more formal working arrangement that involves monetary compensation - I mean hey, it worked for me ;)