Vanilla 1.1.8 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
Community moderation is a feature available at this forum that is intended to allow regular users to moderate the discussions in order to make moderation a mostly hands-off activity for the administrators and official moderators.
The idea is simple: Users receive points for positive contributions to the community, lose points for negative contributions, are permitted to vote whether comments are positive or negative contributions a number of times proportionate to their current number of points, and are not allowed to contribute to the community at all if they lose too many points. How long a user is unable to post or edit comments depends on how negative his score is and on how often he visits the forum during the probationary period.
When a user accesses the forum for the first time, he receives 10 points as a bonus to start with. Each subsequent day the user logs in, he gets 2 points as a bonus for visiting. For each intervening day the user has not logged in, he is penalized 1 point for absence from the forum, up to a maximum penalty of 10 points. This penalty is also limited to the positive points that the user has received for non-moderation actions, specifically to the net sum of the user's sign-up bonus, login bonuses, and absence penalties on record. This prevents a user from having a negative score unless he has actually received negative moderation votes.
Users may not have more than 25 points unless they are granted a permission to avoid this limit.
If a user has a negative points score, he will not be permitted to post or edit comments until his score rises out of the negative range again.
In any 24-hour period, a user is permitted to enter 1 vote per point he has. A user can vote up or down on a comment. Each up vote increases that comment's score by one point. Each down vote decreases the score by one point. For every 10 positive moderation votes received for comments posted by a given user within the past 30 days, that user gets a 1-point bonus. This bonus is temporary and simply calculated based on moderation activity in the past 30 days.
If a particular comment reaches a net score of 10, then the user who posted it will receive a permanent 1-point bonus. If a comment reaches a net score of -10, then the user who posted it will receive a permanent 1-point penalty. The comment bonus or penalty will be revoked if the comment's score crosses the relevant threshold again.
Each discussion has a score, calculated as the sum of the scores of all comments in that discussion. If a particular discussion reaches a score of 10, then the user who initiated the discussion receives a 2-point bonus. If a discussion reaches a score of -10, then the user who initiated it receives a 2-point penalty. The discussion bonus or penalty will be revoked if the discussion's score crosses the relevant threshold again.
When a comment has a score of 10 or more, or a score of -10 or less, then users will be able to vote that its moderation was unfair. If 10 unfair votes are recorded, then the moderation actions that caused it to reach such a high or such a low score are revoked and each user who moderated the comment in that direction receives a 1-point penalty.
If a comment reaches a score of -15, it will automatically be hidden. If a discussion reaches a score of 10 or higher, then the discussion will receive special styling, depending on the forum's theme. If a discussion reaches a score of -20 or lower, it will automatically be closed to further comments being posted.