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Point System?


Garethp

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You could say that we in a way do have a karma system. We have a number of guru groups (yellow-ish stars) in which people are placed if they've been helpful in those areas. Above those are PHP Freaks recommended (green stars). Then there are the mod and admin groups, but those are for other purposes. The mods and admins are primarily responsible for maintaining the site, but even then it's unlikely that someone would go from regular member to mod or skip other steps in the hierarchy.

 

There is no perfect system, but we've found that manually placing people in groups works best. This has drawbacks as well seeing as people who've been here for a long time, but haven't been placed in another group, might find it unfair that they haven't been selected. Even then, we (the administration) think that the current system is the best. We're open to suggestions though - this is your community after all :)

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Yeah looking at the staff page you can see the order of hierarchy.

Manual is most probably the safer route as introducing some sort of ranking system can still be unfair.

 

When people are promoted or rise up in the hierarchy is the community notified? I don't recall reading topics about someone receiving a rank promotion.

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There are only internal notifications (indirectly, because we nominate and vote). You can, however, check the staff page, which you linked to, if you are interested in knowing who is and isn't staff. If you've been paying attention then you'll for instance have noticed that we dropped the Super Moderator group (purple).

 

Also, people who get promoted to anything will be active members, so you should see them regularly and thus notice their stars change.

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as Daniel said, the manual way tends to work better and has for some time. personally, i can see what'll happen if we start adding karma or points systems - loads of people answering as much as possible without really putting that much thought and effort in, just to have the ability to show off how many stars they have. I'm not huge on that sort of thing - i'm not one to care much about my own post count or karma, i just come here to help and get help.

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Yes, I see what you mean and agree with you.  People would abuse the system b/c they care about getting their precious gold star.  Although, it would be nice to know what level the person that is helping you is at.  Since the current ranks are manually picked there are a lot of helpful people on these forums that aren't chosen.  Maybe there could be a combination of multiple things to get certain stars.  Like posts, karma points, topics started, etc... and certain combinations reward certain stars.  Just a thought... 

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The problem with automated stars, ranks, etc. is that they're not necessarily representative of the user's actual skills. As it were before, someone with ten yellow stars and the rank of Genius (5000+ posts) would not necessarily be a genius. In fact, that person might have been posting crap solutions all over the place.

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I totally agree with you it's just the fact that I know myself along with many other people wouldn't post crap just to get ranks.  It sucks that these trolls are ruining something that's supposed to be meaningful and helpful.

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The main concern with a "karma" system was that people could abuse it.  They might give good karma to someone's post (even their own) simply because they like the person.  Or the same with bad karma.  Despite that concern, we actually did give it a brief run, and sure enough, people were doing exactly that.  We felt that because of this, other people might see high(er) karma'd people and think they are representative of the (ideals of the) community, when in fact they are not.  We felt that the best way to trust people was to just hand pick them.  We do recognize even that is not a guarantee, but we feel that so far it's the best method.  Alternate suggestions are always welcome. 

 

 

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