Method for calculating user rank/kudos
Currently users are ranked based on kudos (I'm not sure how its calculated, though this it's based on BlenderToday's code, I assume up-votes on your posts contribute).
For a site based on suggestions, we may need a method that doesn't simply add up all your votes. Because this encourages too much going for flashy/unrealistic suggestions (a popularity contest) .
We also want ranking to be meaningful, so we can have some assurance that having higher ranking users help run the site has a lower risk of being abused.
In order to have ranking better reflect site goals, I propose:
- votes on your suggestions are ignored entirely.
- votes on your comments have a small impact.
- a suggestion being assigned a task (link patch or design task) has a medium rank-increase.
- closing the task as completed gives a big rank-increase.
- closing the task as invalid gives a small rank-decrease.
This encourages people to:
- Brainstorm with others without being afraid to make suggestions that may not be popular.
- Participate in discussions.
- Make realistic/actionable suggestions.
And discourages:
- Attempting to gain high ranking based on popular/click-bait suggestions.
- Spamming with many incomplete suggestions.
Of course users are often not sure whats realistic or not... and its not the purpose to punish those who make naive suggestions. However users who do suggest useful changes that can be implemented will be rewarded.
2 Comments
I think the conflation of up/down-votes with user reputation is completely wrong in the first place. If I downvote something, that should mean I disagree or I do not think this is a good idea . It shouldn't imply that the user at the other end hast to take a hit on their "score".
Conversely, I might on occasion agree with a proposal from a person that I find utterly incompetent otherwise.
I'm aware that "karma" and "kudos" are not synonyms for "reputation", but in lieu of any other metric, it does pick up this meaning, at least to some degree.
Considering this, I find it tough to accept that a user like erel96 (who hasn't really done anything besides proposing a few things that are known to be popular) has twice the "karma" as Campbell Barton.
TL;DR: Votes shouldn't affect karma at all, ideally it should be a separate system. I agree with the proposal insofar as it takes out the biggest culprit: Proposal votes.
I like and agree with the weighting system you've put in here. I'm a bit dubious about tying karma/rank to edit/moderation privileges. That said, having the user's karma reflect the values we consider important on this site is a good idea in its own right.
An additional note to myself, should I make these changes: a secondary script would need to be written to pass through the user database and recalculate user rank/karma in mass after these changes are enacted so old rank/karma values don't get grandfathered.