In this question, OPIEWebber Lisa Kath brought up a very excellent point regarding trust and reputation:

I have gotten to recognize and value input from certain members on certain listservs. Not everyone on OPIEWeb has a real name posted, and besides profiles, no good way to check the source of the answer to the questions. It would take a lot of time on OPIEWeb for me to recognize folks I don’t already know (hi Russell) and determine whether I value their input. I know that sounds harsh, but research shows trust is built over time

Lisa, we couldn’t agree more. Since OPIEWeb allows for anonymous participation and does not require that people display their real names when asking or responding, there is a certain amount of faith involved with the replies you get. For now at least.

Part of what makes OPIEWeb tick is our reputation system. Users with high rep have proven themselves as reliable and knowledgeable within the OPIEWeb ecosystem. Users earn rep in a handful of ways:

• Ask Good Questions™. A Good Question™ has sufficient information for people to answer it, is clear enough that other users can understand what your underlying issue is, and is useful to other OPIEWebbers. While the following traits are welcome, you will notice that “challenging,” “difficult,” and “obscure” are not required to have a Good Question™. Every time an OPIEWebber up-votes your question, you earn 10 reputation points. If an OPIEWebber provides an answer that gets you through to a solution, you can earn 2 more points by accepting their answer (clicking on the check mark below the voting buttons).
• Provide Great Answers™ to regular questions. You will know a Great Answer™ when you see it. It will be clear, easy-to-read, concise, have references for any “facts,” and links to any additional information required to understand the response. Every time an OPIEWebber up-votes your answers, you earn 10 reputation points. If the OPIEWebber who asked the question accepts your response as the answer that helped them the most, you earn an additional 15 reputation points.
• Sometimes, users ask tough questions that they know will require anyone who attempts to answer it to go an extra mile for additional research or supporting materials. For these instances, OPIEWeb provides a Bounty system. The question asker pledges anywhere from 50 reputation points on up and OPIEWeb will put up an additional 50 reputation points towards the Bounty. The person who gets the accepted answer on the Bounty question gets the whole shebang added to their reputation score. Questions with a Bounty will show the award amount in a little oval in the question title. You can also see all Bounty questions under the “Featured” tab.

Over time, the users that contribute to OPIEWeb the most (by asking Good Questions™ and providing Great Answers™) will have the highest reputation in the system, and you can trust that posts from those folks will be clear and well founded. If the reputation number alone is insufficient to provide a basis of trust you can see any registered user’s OPIEWeb history by clicking on their display name. All questions, answers and comments they have provided are browse-able there in the user profile. (Incidentally, The Russell that Lisa references is Russell Mathews, who just happens to currently have the highest reputation score).

With all these ways to earn reputation and with reputation being so important to gaining authority in OPIEWeb you would expect that there may be some fraud here or there. To combat that, OPIEWeb has a strict 250 point per day rep cap in place (a day is defined as being between 12:00 am UMT and 11:59pm UMT). Any up votes after you have earned 250 rep will not generate any additional rep.
Administrators, moderators and users with reputation of 10,000 have tools at their disposal to quickly dispatch unscrupulous users.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Do you think that OPIEWeb’s reputation score maps to real word trust? Answer in the comments below, or via email at OPIEWeb@Gmail.com.