Giving users a "reputation system" - Should I...?

Question

I'm thinking of adding a reputation system to my Django web application; the site is already being used so I'm trying to be careful about my choices.

Reputation is generated in all actions that contribute to the site, similar to Stackoverflow's system.

I know there are literally millions of ways of implementing this, and this is why I feel quite lost.

Two alternatives I am not sure about are:

• Keep track of reasons why reputation was incremented
• Ignore reasons in order to reduce complexity of the site and overhead

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Would be happy with a few pointers, and directions. Would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

In Django, I'd suggest having a property on the User (or Profile) model that calculates a user's reputation on-demand. Then, cache the reputation with your caching framework and/or store to the database for fast retrieval.

This way, in addition to having the records of what impacts reputation, you can change your reputation criteria at will.

Answer 2

keep track of the reasons, IMHO. It surely wouldn't be that complex, and you don't need to store a huge amount of information, just a datetime, point value, command, target, and originator. If the data gets to be too much after some time dump the DB to a backup medium and clear the history.