recently a campaign was started with tells and messages to counter a few RepBot complaints against a new player which were apparently a result of a shout war .. while i vouched the player, it was because i'd played them before, would play them again, and would recommend them to others as fun to play with .. imho, that's a valid vouch .. but i've withdrawn it because i don't like being asked to vouch for someone for any reason and i don't like the taste of participating in a vouch campaign like this .. i'll re-vouch after a few more games, if it still seems right

for me, to use RepBot vouches or complaints because of something that goes on in shouts, personality conflicts, or any reasons not relevant to a players willingness to play and complete a timely and civil game seems to defeat the whole purpose of what RepBot is about

further, campaigns soliciting RepBot vouches or complaints aimed at other players really don't seem like a good idea at all .. RepBot should be about a players playing reputation not influenced by personality or politics .. RepBot is what it is .. we are who we are .. neither is perfect .. but let's leave politicking and personalities out of RepBot lest we have an outbreak of RepBot wars .. shout wars are just silly and easily ignored .. but RepBot is something many of us rely on .. let's not confuse the two

1) use the friends feature. If you don't like the way someone vouches, remove them from your vouch list and you remove their influence on your results, e.g. maria is known to vouch for all droppers.

2) RepBot used to mark the complaints with actual saved games with a * and probably still does. The problem with that is when the match expires, it no longer shows up. I lobbied avik to have RepBot keep the asterisk until the complaint gets removed, but he vetoed the idea.

3) Foreseeing this type of thing as a problem, I wrote RepBot originallly with a limit of 10 vouches and 10 complaints, the idea being that if they held some value for someone, they would use them mroe carefully. avik removed the limit, and thus the reputation "economy".

4) How does one identify an abuser socksey? Your opinion is different than mine, and if I asked you to complain and vouch exactly as I have you would and should refuse.

5) There have been lots of ideas floated about regarding how to improve RepBot, but noone has stepped up to write any code. I personally think there is something of value that could be done offline simply by storing the full saved games list published daily by fibs.com and writing queries against it, e.g. you ought to be able to tell who played who on what day, and wether the matches were saved or not, or wether they expired. From that you ought to be able to count the number of times people play each other and infer vouches automatically and perhaps even give them weights, and use that data as an improved friends recommendation.

Another example of an invalid vouch is vouches granted by bots, the gBots will give vouches?? how can a bot give a vouch to a dropper?

i think bots should be prohibited from giving vouches

It is always valid to VOUCH mookie

moooookie