Karma



Karma is the force that causes, in theory, bad guys to lose and morally correct heroes to swim in victory. The formerly existent and no longer present NumberXVMoogle was programmed with a system that allowed users to receive karma from other users. Users would receive positive karma for making generally agreeable comments, posting hilarity-ensuing jokes, and approved other actions. Negative karma was dished out for showing opinions that were generally disagreed with, performing wrong actions, and so forth. A user's karma, therefore, was dependent on the community or certain individuals' opinions of their behavior and activity. A high karma value was praised, whereas a low one was generally hated.

Basically, karma states that doing good deeds results in good things happening to you, and the same for bad deeds causing bad personal effects.

Etymolo s gy
Karma is a concept of India-originating ethnic religions, as well as Buddhism which only fulfills one of these qualities. Karma originated in India many centuries of decades of years of seasons of months of weeks of days of hours of minutes of seconds ago. At this time, India was primarily Hindu, in which karma was viewed as a spiritually originated law over which God directly presided. Hinduism in today's world also stresses that karma is not only dependent on people's actions, but also on an absolute deity or God.

In Buddhism, one's karma is a deciding factor in an individual's continuation in the cycle of rebirth or their ascension to nirvana. Karma is considered a cause of other effects, in connection to its general definition. Interestingly, karma in Buddhism is not judged positive or negative by the effect. Instead, the "good" or "bad" nature of an action's motivation on intention is the deciding factor of whether positive or negative force is produced.

Beginning
In March of 2010, programming expert and house cat Adola brought an IRC bot to : NumberXVMoogle. One of the bot's primary abilities was to log and generate users' karma based on the positive and negative karma given to users by other users. Since the bot was a new addition, no policies were created to handle the bot or its karma-presiding feature. Within the first few days of its creation, the bot's karma feature was a fun toy for the community.

Abuse
As you can assume, the feature was abused almost initially after the first week or so of its presence. Just like all of the other features of the bot, young'ins and noobs were very offended and abusive of the karma feature that NumberXVMoogle possessed. Karma often covered entire IRC screens in a channel, since the general community loved to spam. However, it should also be noted that most users didn't know that the bot could receive commands by PM.

Users very quickly gained karma that skyrocketed positively and negatively. An especially notable case is that of Hexedmagica; Hexedmagica's karma was constantly extremely low, at some points below -100,000. Another is UnknownEnigma; his was under the -1,000,000 mark. But that was for sh*ts and giggles, so it doesn't count.

Ending
The abuse of the bot's karma system continued for most of the IRC's history. However, Adola disappeared without a trace in the autumn season of 2010. The IRC bot followed Adola on the way out in early December, and the karma feature was never replaced. After the disappearance of the bot, the community greatly struggled without the karma feature, as well as several other of the bot's functions. However, with the great trolling/spamming potential of the karma feature, it was easily missed the most by this community in particular.

Usage
Before its destruction, karma could be submitted and checked through NumberXVMoogle with three command types:


 * NICKNAME++ = Adds the number of "+" minus 1 to the given nickname's karma value.
 * Ex: SilverCrono++ = +1 to SilverCrono's karma value.
 * NICKNAME-- = Subtracts the number of "-" minus 1 from the given nickname's karma value.
 * Ex: SilverCrono = -3 to SilverCrono's karma value.
 * !karma NICKNAME = Displays current karma on defined user.
 * Ex: !karma Silversey =  [Your nick], Silversey's karma is -192,285

The first command was used to add positive karma to a user. The second command type was used to give a user negative karma. Finally, the third and last command type was used to have NumberXVMoogle display the given user's current karma value.

Below is an example of how karma works. Displayed values assume that the two given users have never been given karma before, and therefore had initial values of "0".

 GoodGuyIsGood-  !karma GoodGuyIsGood  BadGuyIsBad: GoodGuyIsGood's karma is -4  BadGuyIsBad+++  !karma BadGuyIsBad  GoodGuyIsGood: BadGuyIsBad's karma is 2

Trivia

 * Karma commands are still used occasionally, despite their having no effect now. They are still used in the same situations, though are much rarer than they were many months ago.