EDIT: The below was written under the assumption others were having the same difficulties with the rating system I did. Now that I see other wise, the post sums up to this: I suggest arbitrary topics appear on the GDNet home page to inspire contributions. You can skip the TL;DR, but it will be left for reference. I am combining a comment, suggestion and idea. My apologies in advance if this has been done somewhere I didn't notice before.

So what's the deal?

I feel the forum rating system is bureaucratic and unbalanced, and I know it isn't going away. I feel obligated to suggest an idea to improve on it: Offer topics for members to share knowledge and to allow an automated system to recognize their work. These would be held in a contest-like fashion, but would not be heavily organized. I do not intend to recommend anything too formal. In fact, members would upload articles based on a topic changed regularly right by the poll such as...

Quote:

Explain the best ways to implement spatial partitioning for a forest on a floating island 10,000 feet over the sea. The player can navigate between the island and a boat via a very long rope.

It could be possible for members to place their submission on their development journal or on another trusted site dedicated to similar content such as CodeProject. To keep close to the community-wide system now implemented, members could vote on content they like. "Winners" could receive a rating boost based on positive votes and nothing else. Users would get this rating boost only if they got enough votes to achieve a minimum payout. What I'm suggesting is that there is also not just one winner, although some will do better than others. Others still can be bad enough to not get a boost, but I do feel something ought to be given to those who make the time to try and help out a community.

5log(x)

seems to be a fair rate of growth if you consider X to be the number of votes and Y to be the rating boost. At 0 votes I would think some initial boost (Another 5?) would be great considering the user is taking time out of their day to do something for people (s)he does not know. I am implying that the material is appropriate and worthy of displaying. At 100 positive votes the user would have accumulated 10 points to their rating. To prevent an unfair spike, a submission can be made read-only after so many votes. Given the function is logarithmic, the growth would slow dramatically anyway. As I will explain below, I do not think ratings should be lost from this unless trouble makers are obvious. In other words, this would be in the hands of higher-ups. The votes are lopsided enough in the forums as is. In short, my suggestion is a simple addition to the current system to recognize effort from supportive users.

Why do you care about ratings so much?

Even if you have no negative standing in the community you can just lose points from people who do what can be described as "rate and run". It's a bit of a bummer to see ratings go down for no reason at all, especially my own! Why do I care? Because I or someone else might have something useful to say. The board settings offer an option to hide posts from people under a certain rating. This sounds good in theory considering that there are people to keep an eye out for, and with tens of thousands of visitors a day something ought to be done to give the mods a break. However, that little number is meant to represent your reputation, and it's mere value can shut you up in several people's posts, even if you had a solution to the problem in the OP or a great idea that could change the way people think about their own project(s). Having a low enough rating puts you on a mod "watch list", even if you've done nothing wrong. The system works, but can easily become one sided and can annul the input of someone perfectly useful. As they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. All I ask is that if GDNet is going to be one of the only forums you can find with a rating system, at least give users the motivation to play a part and try to give the community a reason to participate in another light. Think of it as having the servers automatically acknowledge the positive aspects of a user as well as the negative.

Why should we listen to you?

Because what I am suggesting will benefit GDNet in both content and morale. With an automated system designed to recognize effort made to support this site, users will upload more and more content knowing they at least have better standing and can be more noticeable in topics where they may have been ignored before. People who actually know what they are talking about will be promoted, as they should be. More content will pile up, making for maybe another GDNet book release?

Fine, but now what makes you think OTHERS care that much? What makes you think WE care that much?

Because you obviously do! One description of the rank value from the FAQ is...

Quote:

To give users an idea of their "position" in the GDNet community and what others think of them

I have heard several mods tell me that they do not care about what people think of them or of one another, but that's hard to believe when they support a site that is crazy enough about it to stick a counter on every member like we are the cast of an uneventful remake of Logan's Run. I just don't understand why other approaches to isolating problem users weren't taken like searches in posts for foul language or poor grammar/spelling, or to at least hide the ratings for the moderators own use, where it can be better trusted. The GDNet is unusual for having a system that gauges integrity of developers old and new with ambiguous standards, which makes little sense to me other than to make mods lives a little easier. This is fine, but it still chances putting potentially useful information into a dark corner when people may need to hear about it. Why implicitly discourage that information to be here? Sure, you get small bumps down every now and then, but there are occasions I have logged on and I have seen a large drop and I have not made a post for long enough to know something isn't right. It's easy trolling, really. I won't name names, but you can click on random profiles and check some posts of low rated users and see perfectly fine and intelligent conversation coming from them, but some of it may be going to waste. Although I did put a lot of thought into this, I don't care enough to lose sleep over it. I just feel that if we have to entrust our integrity to an effectively volatile unsigned integer while we are here, it would be a good move to take a "You-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours" approach to members. The idea in short is you allow your scripts to bump up the ratings of members in exchange for new content for people to benefit from, and keep some consistency with what's already there by fueling the system by votes. It's really the exact same system you have, only with the line between the "write for us" section and the forums blurred! Hell, you can even let the members come up with the topics or just add the system to the "Write for us" submissions! The 3 goals are to encourage users to help out GDNet, motivate them to keep doing so and to make the most impressive members more apparent. Even though I am unhappy with the rating system, I keep coming back because the people here are remarkably intelligent and I want to know what they have to say, and be recognized for it fairly! I myself certainly want to get my own rating up because I have stuff I want to share and to be recognized for. This has been a long post, but I hope you find my suggestion to be worth considering. Don't forget the little people. Thanks for reading, and cheers! -Zyro [Edited by - zyrolasting on November 12, 2009 10:16:12 AM]