I’m under the impression the reputation points are either the combined number of upvotes or that minus downvotes

IIRC from kbin – and assuming mbin didn’t change things – boosts counted for two points while upvotes (favorites) are one point and downvotes (reduces) are one point. Boosts are basically retweets, IIRC, and wouldn’t be coming from lemmy users – just from Mastodon, mbin, and other tools that support it.

Edit: To clarify, I mean downvotes reduce by one point.

I don’t know, but there’s a related thread here: https://slrpnk.net/post/18399280

No answers there (as of time of writing this comment), but someone did say they asked about it on IRC.

I’m not involved with running it – and given that this is likely to be a politics heavy community, I’m probably going to stay out of it for the most part. 🙃️ I just happened to see the announcement post that @3dmvr@lemm.ee made to !newcommunities@lemmy.world about a week ago and remembered it.

If you or @3dmvr@lemm.ee want to start a thread in !communitypromo@lemmy.ca feel free though!

!unlockthread@lemm.ee is probably what you’re thinking of.

Unless I really know I need something more complicated, I would just make a struct for Item. Create an array of Items that serve as the templates for instantiation. Handwrite the first pass of a few Items in C++ (or maybe C99 for syntactical convenience). Switch to CSV later and work with bulk definition in a spreadsheet.

I wouldn’t use either a DB or JSON for this unless I had a really good reason. Like, I know I need to do a lot of complicated joins or I actually have hierarchical data – not just an array of objects, respectively. The additional complexity of dealing with them isn’t worth it otherwise.