Plus-Minus is 1st Ohio Battery’s community scoreboard. You earn points by contributing, you lose them when the room tells you to take a lap, and the whole thing helps keep the comment section skating in the right direction.
The short version: Good comments raise your Plus-Minus rating. Bad comments lower it. Keep your rating healthy and you can comment, create forum topics and vote on other members’ contributions.
+1 for posting a comment
+2 for creating a forum topic
100 needed to create topics or vote
How You Earn Plus-Minus
Every member gets one point for posting a comment and two points for creating a forum topic. From there, the community can add to or subtract from your total by voting on your comments and topics.
Write something smart, funny, useful or perfectly timed, and your rating can climb. Post something lazy, hostile or wildly offside, and the math can move the other way.
What You Need to Participate
- Commenting: You can comment as long as your Plus-Minus rating does not fall below -50.
- Forum topics: You need a Plus-Minus rating of at least 100 to create a new forum topic.
- Voting: You need a Plus-Minus rating of at least 100 to vote on other members’ comments or topics.
How Voting Works
Upvotes and downvotes affect the author’s Plus-Minus rating. You cannot vote on your own stuff, and you only get one vote per item, so use it like an adult with a keyboard.
Vote for comments that make the site better. Downvote comments that are off topic, bad faith, abusive, spammy or otherwise running afoul of the commenting policy. Do not downvote someone just because they disagree with you about a line combination, a trade rumor or whether the power play is legally allowed to shoot.
What Happens to Badly Downvoted Comments
If a comment reaches -5 votes, it becomes dimmed so it is harder to read. If it reaches -10, it gets locked. Forum topics that hit the spam threshold may be removed.
That should not happen often. When it does, the system is usually telling everyone what they already knew.
Do Not Campaign About Downvotes
Downvotes happen. Sometimes they are deserved. Sometimes the room is wrong. Either way, complaining about downvotes is not a growth industry around here.
In aggregate, the system works because the community cares about the place. Help it work: reward good contributions, punish bad ones and keep grudges out of it.
The Leaderboard
Want to see who has stacked the biggest rating over the years? The Plus-Minus Leaderboard tracks the top accounts by accumulated Plus-Minus rating.
Consider it a monument to useful comments, good timing and spending a possibly unreasonable amount of time around here.
