Points expire after 12 months
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I personally can live with the expiration of points. I never heard of guys stopping to contribute due to the loss of points after 12 months. While having a nice rank with a fancy badge and showing up in the hall of fame is nice indeed, it's not the main motivation of answering questions in the forum or contribute to the wiki and the doc notes - at least for me. And this holds true for many others of my fellow mods I talked to as well.
To the most part it is just fun, we like the good atmosphere here and the respectful treading of each other - it's one of the very rare forums where hardly ever a flame war is fought or serious trolling occurs. We like to help others, sharing knowledge or spending a couple of hours to solve other developers' problems because the issue just sound interesting. And not to forget, we do learn new things here too.
So, overall, it's a nice community, and that's worth much more than some points. It's a place we like to be (and to meet in social events like the DevDays or the Contributors' Summit).
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Well, I think a lot of people will loose many points this month. Last year, we had project Elf around this time. That led to a lot of points being gained, but those will be lost now after one year. Let's see if the top 5 will change the next couple of weeks.
I never heard anyone leaving because of these points starting to evaporate. Do you have (nick) names for me who they might be? It would be nice if you could somehow see how your points are build up, so you can brace yourself for loosing points. Perhaps a little graph on the user page that shows per week how many points were gained over the last year?
I am not here strictly for points, but I will admit that they do help a bit to go that extra step, to add that tag, etc. I like hanging out here, for the most part.
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Hi Sierdzio, Volker, Andre, Everyone,
Of course being here and enjoying the great atmosphere on devnet is the most important thing. We all like it when somebody thanks for help given. It makes us part of a great happening, making friends and learning new things.
But we are all humans too, some of us twitter they have reached the 20000 points ;) , there is more activity when "milestones" are about to be passed. It is influencing us more than we think sometimes.
Someone mentioned that it is hard to get more points when the ones from last year vanish and suddenly stops responding and giving solutions.
Have a look at the member list and look at the top page and also when their activity ceases. Your suggestion to have graphs would help detecting / proving this.
I just think it's worth examining this and brainstorm a way to prevent it from happening.
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First of all it is not clear to me if after 12 months points are reset or downgraded or if after 12 months of inactivity they are. I don't believe the former is a good idea, while I believe the latter is.
Expiring points is a way to force people to spend a few minutes on the forum trying to get good answers. Having a thank you feature will help too. The idea is that human being are subject to vanity, and want to show to the rest of the world they can do something good and earned a badge/title. Of course, having the score always increasing makes it just a matter of time, not of quality (of activity). On the other hand, having the points going down for sure makes people to think that it does not matter how many time they will spend on the forum, they always will have to start over again. So at least, if points have to expire, make a kind of rank based on per-year activity to let a user to be a mad scientist of year XYZ, no matter what his activity on year XYZ+1 will be.And besides, while I agree that forum scoring is not something so much important as writing good code, it could be a way to force people staying on the forum even for those subjects that do not interest them directly.
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[quote author="fluca1978" date="1323683015"]First of all it is not clear to me if after 12 months points are reset or downgraded or if after 12 months of inactivity they are. I don't believe the former is a good idea, while I believe the latter is. [/quote]
It is definitly after 12 months (on a day by day base, so tomorrow, I will loose the points that I got on 12.12.2010.
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Let me explain the thinking here.
Points expire after 12 months, meaning we only count activity within the last 12 months. Initially, I had set it to 6 but that made a lot of people very sad, so we extended it.
Expiration of points has 2 reasons. First, it is meant to encourage activity. That's why you get points for everything you do, regardless of its quality. So the example of the great wiki page does not really fit into this.
The second reason is that non-expiring points will accumulate to tremendous amounts, at least for some members (I'm looking at you, Mad Scientists!). That will be a bit intimidating for new users, don't you think? In addition, it helps building a certain clique of top members which is not helpful either.
What does not expire is the badges that show reputation, like the Certification badges and the Moderator ones (unless you leave the team, obviously). It's important to keep these things apart.
And on the matter of losing people because of expired points: I have a hard time believing that this is really the reason. Forums inevitably lose contributors over time - because their life changes, because they lose interest or simply because they lack time.
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[quote author="Alexandra" date="1323693627"]Let me explain the thinking here.
Points expire after 12 months, meaning we only count activity within the last 12 months. Initially, I had set it to 6 but that made a lot of people very sad, so we extended it.
Expiration of points has 2 reasons. First, it is meant to encourage activity. That's why you get points for everything you do, regardless of its quality. So the example of the great wiki page does not really fit into this.
The second reason is that non-expiring points will accumulate to tremendous amounts, at least for some members (I'm looking at you, Mad Scientists!). That will be a bit intimidating for new users, don't you think? In addition, it helps building a certain clique of top members which is not helpful either.[/quote]
Sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. Are you trying to encourage the mad Scientists to contribute less, because are a clique (yes, we had fun at the DevDays) and our points are intimidating for new users?
[quote]
What does not expire is the badges that show reputation, like the Certification badges and the Moderator ones (unless you leave the team, obviously). It's important to keep these things apart.[/quote]
That would be nice, if it were true. If I look at my badges, there are very, very few that actually express "reputation". Let me list them:- Groupie -> doesn't mean all that much, other than that I joined a few groups. Groups are not all that meaningfull at Devnet, I get the impression.
- Group Owner -> Basically means I was the first to come up with an idea of a group, meaning that I was around and had sufficient rank at the time the features was introduced to request a group. Not much more than that.
- Certified Developer/Specialist -> Yes, this is a status of sorts, but one that has nothing to do with activity on Devnet.
- Ambassador -> same thing
- Hall of Fame -> Yes, this one expresses reputation (of sorts, anyway), but it will be lost just like the points will. There are more badges like this, like the one for starting topics. As these don't last, they don't count.
- Contributors Summit -> Might mean something, but not all that related to DevNet activity, status or reputation.
- Doc Note Guru -> Yes, I guess this one will stick. Doesn't mean much in terms of reputation though, only that I wrote a certain number of notes. The quality of those notes is not considdered in the badge.
- Modrator -> OK, I guess this one has reputation attached to it.
So, there is really not all that much in terms of badges that expresses a (lasting) reputation. Not more than the points and the several rank levels already do, anyway. Or, perhaps I should just conclude I don't have much of reputation, which could be equally true. Personally, I was not happy to see badges introduced that are dependent on DevNet activity. The whole idea was that these things would be orthogonal, but as it stands, they are not. Badges should be something you earn and can't loose again, especially if you can loose points and rank due to inactivity. As you say: it is important to keep these things apart.
I think it would be nice to award people badges that will really stick, and get rid of the ones that don't mean anything are temporary in nature anyway like "Thread Master". Let badges be something to earn, to be proud of, and to keep. I like the idea of fluca1978 of handing out badges like "Mad Scientist, 2011" and just having people keep those.
I know there is some work being done on "real" reputation features like a "Thank you" or "Good answer" feature. That would be good. But we don't have these yet. There is no way to reward the author of a great wiki page, even though setting up these pages can represent a significant time investment. Untill we have a system in place to permanently reward quality contributions to Devnet, I think it may be too soon to start taking away the only credit they got for it: points and rank.
[quote]
And on the matter of losing people because of expired points: I have a hard time believing that this is really the reason. Forums inevitably lose contributors over time - because their life changes, because they lose interest or simply because they lack time.[/quote]
I agree with you there. -
[quote author="Andre" date="1323695549"][quote author="Alexandra" date="1323693627"]Let me explain the thinking here.
Points expire after 12 months, meaning we only count activity within the last 12 months. Initially, I had set it to 6 but that made a lot of people very sad, so we extended it.
Expiration of points has 2 reasons. First, it is meant to encourage activity. That's why you get points for everything you do, regardless of its quality. So the example of the great wiki page does not really fit into this.
The second reason is that non-expiring points will accumulate to tremendous amounts, at least for some members (I'm looking at you, Mad Scientists!). That will be a bit intimidating for new users, don't you think? In addition, it helps building a certain clique of top members which is not helpful either.[/quote]
Sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. Are you trying to encourage the mad Scientists to contribute less, because are a clique (yes, we had fun at the DevDays) and our points are intimidating for new users?
[/quote][/quote]Heh, that is a misunderstanding indeed. No, I am not encouraging anybody to contribute less, that would be silly. :) No, my point is to give others a chance to sneak up to your tail. Imagine how your point count would look like 2 years down the road - or anybody's who has been around since the early beta phase!
Besides, wouldn't it be boring if it was "Mad Scientist, once and for all times"?
And, I do remember quite some people complaining about others gathering points for what they perceived as less valuable contributions.
[quote author="Andre" date="1323695549"][quote author="Alexandra" date="1323693627"]
What does not expire is the badges that show reputation, like the Certification badges and the Moderator ones (unless you leave the team, obviously). It's important to keep these things apart.[/quote][...]
I know there is some work being done on "real" reputation features like a "Thank you" or "Good answer" feature. That would be good. But we don't have these yet. There is no way to reward the author of a great wiki page, even though setting up these pages can represent a significant time investment. Untill we have a system in place to permanently reward quality contributions to Devnet, I think it may be too soon to start taking away the only credit they got for it: points and rank.
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[/quote]I think this is growing a bit out of proportion. It's not like suddenly all your points will disappear. We expire some old points and you will get new ones for the things you do today. Members who contribute a lot will still have the most points and hence the highest rank.
We're getting there with implementation of the still lacking features not to worry.
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[quote author="Alexandra" date="1323698877"]
Besides, wouldn't it be boring if it was "Mad Scientist, once and for all times"?
[/quote]It will be, in the meaning that a mad scientist is nothing more than an old member that has being in the forum for a long time. But very active members will remain at the top of the ranking even with point expiration. While this is far and right for them, the result of the point expiration is that you are hitting the medium users. I don't have a solution for this, but it sounds to me this is not the right way to improve activity on the forum.
[quote author="Alexandra" date="1323698877"]
And, I do remember quite some people complaining about others gathering points for what they perceived as less valuable contributions.
[/quote]That is why I believe that a thank-to feature, as implemented from vbulletin (for instance) will be great. Giving points to any contribution without any distinction is not very useful, giving quality based points it is. I don't have a solution for this either. Sounds like the score expiration is a too big problem compared to the aim.
