Allakhazam

For the Pokémon, see Alakazam.

Allakhazam is a website providing forum and lookup services for several online RPGs, including Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest, Everquest 2, EVE Online, and Guild Wars.

It currently has over 1.3 million registered usernames and nearly 9 million posts between the forums and individual pages for each item in every game covered on the site.

Karma System

While the site's forums and comments are watched by the site's administrators, a degree of control similar to, but more extensive than, Slashdot's is granted to a portion of the users by way of the karma system. In essence, posts can be rated up (increasing the poster's karma) or down (decreasing it) to manipulate whether or not the post meets the current filter criteria. Unlike Slashdot's karma system, however, only a flat number is assigned to the posts and comments, rather than both a number and a type of rating.

Minor Controversies over the Karma System

Originally, every post and every poster's karma was visible to every user. For reasons that are currently unknown outside the administrators, the per-post karma was made invisible in 2005, while the per-user karma was made invisible earlier in 2007 due to issues with certain people complaining frequently when their karma was lowered. There are no signs of either value being made visible again to normal users.