Reputation's Four Factors

This interaction is scored along Four Factors, which combine to form your Overall Reputation Rating. This Rating, in turn, determines your CBSSports.com Community Level: an Amateur to start, then a Rookie, followed by a Pro, an Allstar and finally, a Superstar.

With each level of interaction comes a greater level of permissions and benefits allowing greater creativity and influence across the community.

Your Overall Reputation Rating is made up of these Four Factors:

• Connections
• Value
• Participation
• Skills

It is possible to have a relatively high Overall Reputation Rating based on a high rating in only one or two of the Four Factors; however, it is highly unlikely that you will reach the highest of the Five Levels. Each factor has a maximum number of points available; therefore doing extremely well in only one area will not compensate for the areas in which you are lacking.

Here are the Four Factors in greater detail:

• Connections: Your Connections Rating represents your drawing power and sphere of influence. This is essentially composed of the number of members who have saved your profile as one of their Favorite Members, as well as the number of Members referred, which are new members who have joined as a result of your contributions to the CBSSports.com community. As an added kicker, being added as a Favorite Member by a member with a high Overall Reputation Rating provides greater impact to your Connections score than being added by a member with a lower Reputation Rating. Finally, the number of members that joined the community as a result of an invitation sent by you, is also taken into consideration when calculating your Connections rating
  
  
• Value: Your Value Rating is based on the total ratings a user gets across all their content, which is then added up and divided by the number of posts made by that user. So in essence, the more ratings you get for each post the better your reputation will be.
  
  Below are the factors that go into converting the number of stars someone gives you into the actual number that affects your reputation:
  
  1. The reputation of the user that submitted the rating. The higher someone's reputation is the more weight their rating has.
  
  2. The scale the reviewer uses to rate posts.
  
  3. The type of content being rated. Each type of content we allow has an internal weight relative to the amount of time a user spends writing or reading that type of content. You are expected to put more time into a blog entry than into a reply in a message board, so those have a higher weight.
  
  
• Participation: The Participation Rating is assigned based upon the number and frequency of your participation with CBSSports.com. The more active you are on message boards, in the games arena, with fantasy leagues and in contests -- the higher your rating. However, the quality of your submissions must also be high to get the greatest impact to your Overall Reputation Rating.
  
  
• Skills: Your Skills Rating represents how well you perform in games of knowledge and skills. These games include Fantasy games as well as CBS Games ratings.

• Post content with a perceived high quality to the message boards
• Objectively rate others' content
• Add high Reputation members to your favorites list
• Invite friends who are not already CBSSports.com members to become a part of the community
• Enter contests
• Visit the site frequently
• Sign up for fantasy games
• Play casual games

• Infrequent visits to the site
• Infrequent submissions to the message boards
• Rating content in a haphazard or contrary manner
• Not participating in other community activities such as gaming, fantasy and contests
• Using offensive language when interacting with the CBSSports.com community