Reputation Bot

The Reputation Bot was created for communities where the main focus is on mutual help between users.

Normal level systems, which are based on pure activity are not able to reflect how much a user contributes to the community. User which have a lot of knowledge and are helping all the time have the same level like users which asks a lot of questions all the time. That's where the Reputation Bot comes in handy.

How does it work?

The bot gets triggered by so called "thankwords". These are user defined words (We provide reasonable default settings for every supported language) which usually are something like "Thanks" or "thx" or something completely different. Additionally its also possible to give reputation via a command, if that is more to your liking.

On receiving the thankword the bot will perform several check, which might lead to giving reputation to a identified target. If the bot cant identify a target it will question the user which used the thankword to give reputation to a available user.

We decided against a command for giving rep for multiple reasons:

1. Users nearly always write some thank phrase anyway, which we can use to identify targets.
2. Actively asking the user to give reputation, will remind him and make it easy to give reputation. This is less work for the user. It is important to make it as easy as possible.
3. A command would be an actively reminded action by the user and can be considered as additional work besides thanking the person who helped.
4. The bot is not disruptive and deletes his messages afterwards to keep the channel clean.

All in all we want to make it as easy and intuitive as possible to give reputation. It should be a no brainer for the users to use and should cause as less additional actions as possible.