This goes off topic, but I have to say that I disagree with the current voting system of voting to users. During betatesting I have asked the option of not being voted and not voting others, but I have been told that I cannot avoid being voted. Anyways, I will keep not voting anyone else.

I have asked also that the list of voters be public, but this request was also denied.

I would prefer open votes to articles, not individuals, with a brief explanation of the reason for the vote. Among other benefits, it would avoid the need of guesses or conspiracy interpretations.

As I understand it, reputation is a complex subject of my personal evaluation,
not something that anyone else should decide for me. And in particular, the
belief that reputation can be represented by a number and that there exist a
magic reputation-computing formula for that is plainly outrageous.

This means, any such formula is completly arbitrary and playing and tweaking
with that may be fun, but not serious. As such, it can only be a source of
disagreement. Moreover, as I do not see any reason why such a figure is
needed, I find this whole activity as a waste of energy.

Hence my proposal: what is better and simplest is just to publish objective
information. Namely, in primes 1 terms, for each user the numbers of ordinary
posts, blogs, etc, with links to their lists. Let each one make his own
evaluation, in case that he needs it.

And I think that a voting system, if that is wanted, should be article
centered instead of author centered. This means, what is important is to
identify good quality contributions (I think that pagan has already stressed
this point). For instance, in a toy scenario, author A posted two articles,
one very good and one very bad, and author B posted two mediocre articles. It
may well occur that A and B get the same reputation figure. Does it help me to
arrive to the good article by A?

And good or bad articles may be located elsewhere, in what are now called
posts, answers or comments. But the latter are not eligible for voting. I find
this distinction also arbitrary. Moreover when applied to legacy articles.

Actually, I have doubts about a pure voting based system, as it gives room to
manipulations of diverse kinds. Will has promised to keep an eye on that, but
I have doubts that he could cope with all possible maneuvers. May be that a
refereeing complementary system could help. But who would volunteer as referee?

@Axel Vogt 

I think that this invention of the "reputation" figure makes no sense. In particular, I think that the computation of the so called back-reputation is incorrect as it implies a post-facto change of rules. During betatesting I have being arguing largely about this issue with both Will and Bryon.

Because of the absurdity of this figure I have asked them the option to have it removed from my posts, but I have been denied that right. So, may be that I should keep it in zero as a protest. Or request an imaginary number instead...

@Will 

To the contrary, I find that this removal of threading information makes many discussions in Primes 1 much harder to understand, as I miss who answers whom, and time order is not enough to recontruct these relations. Unless you have thrown away that information, I prefer to have an option to set it visible. If not by indenting, by some other graphical sign.

@Axel Vogt 

The information is that the Primes 1 blogs became Primes 2 posts. Quoting Will at the beta site:

We intend for Questions and Posts to be pretty clearly seperated. A post is quite similar to the old idea of a blog post. You create a post to share something with the community.

And quoting Bryon in the beta site:

The idea is that anything that is not a question should be a post.  The word "blog" has different connotations (some negative) for different people, so we wanted to avoid that.  "Posts" seemed a very broad, neutral term that can encompass many things.  It could be a journal-like entry, such as what we've seen in our blogs, it could be a technical discussion, a Maple Worksheet that someone has been working on, or virtually anything else.

On the other hand, a section of the column on the right is titled "Maplesoft Blog Posts" (I wonder about its connotation).

In all, I am not happy with this change. I know that I am not alone.

@Axel Vogt 

Actually, it is substantially less senseless than at first. In betatesting I got from Will a "discount" from

"You must enter a body with at least 50 characters"

to

"You must enter a body with at least 15 characters"