At VKCW.net we are licensed radio amateurs "radio hams" who operate Morse Code (CW). As such, we don't have issues with spam etc, we only allow licensed radio hams to join the site. There is an issue with Karma. After being operational after several weeks, it is embarassing that I as Super Admin have already High Karma and no one else even has low Karma. This may be because I've posted bugs to the main Wikidot site, or in here, but this is counter productive: for community sites, users who only post or reply to posts in the forum, should quickly gain the right to be able to post links, and quickly get some Karma incentive. Admin should not run away ahead of the pack when there are plenty of other people making good posts. Another factor that should help Karma rise imho, is if a user logs in frequently and/or visits the site frequently when logged in, and reads various posts. It makes sense to encourage people and not to create an impression of elitism because I set up the site, and it is clearly not right that many of those regular posters there, not one single other person among our members, has even ANY karma. By now, there should be several Medium Karmas and many low Karmas at very least. Can this be fine tuned as it appears something is wrong, or, the algorithm hasn't been thought out for such community sites. TQ.
The fact that only level 1 karma users can post is actually a setting in the Site Manager. If you set it to level 0, then anybody, even those with no karma, will be allowed to post links.
In the Site Manager, go to the Security » Abuse tab. There should be a dropdown box with the number 1 in it. Change this to 0 and your users will be allowed to post links regardless of karma.
Optionally, if you feel that karma is irrelevant for your site, you can hide the karma images using CSS. Put the following code into the code block on your Theme Page:
.printuser img.small { background-image: none !important; }
Hope this helps.
Timothy Foster - @tfAuroratide
Auroratide.com - Go here if you're nerdy like me
The exact parameters that determine the karma level and when you can get moved up is a closely-guarded secret by the developers and they have never released any more details than at http://www.wikidot.com/doc:karma.
However, if you wish to add a wish to the official bugs and wishes site go to http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:_all, although no wishes relating to karma have ever been delivered. See http://feedback.wikidot.com/system:page-tags/tag/karma/category/wish for current wishes relating to karma.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.