Whatever happen to the user ranking board?

It's gonna be coming back along with a bunch of cool additions that give users more direct control over their rankings.. =) But yeah, six years ago the world was a bit different.. these days there are 80 zillion places where programmers can hang out and still stay connected. Along with improving our article library, this is my #1 priority right now.

Anyway this was a great incentive to keep people posting useful info, so where'd it go?

[s]The incentive was a little too good in the opinon of many. The rankings were removed to keep people from posting pointless responses or threads just to get their ranking up to the next level.[/s]

[s]We're looking to bring it back in a more structured manner with ways for people to be penalized by the community for trying to jack up their rating by posting useless stuff.[/s]

Whoops nevermind I was thinking you were talking about an older system we had in place. Check out each individual forum for right now though - you'll see top contributors so work to get your name on there! I think it's for the past week IIRC

Drew, I'm not sure he's talking about the ones ranked by just number of forum posts.. those ranks *were* pretty useless. The new system in the works is going to reward user participation in a number of ways. Part of our end goal this year is to recognize user contributions and participation a lot better.

Sorry for the delay, still not used to the profile, it's pretty thorough. I was talking about back when there was something like a 'rating: + or -' link on everyone's post, it was based on the usefulness of that particular post and I think there was some variability to the amount of rating you got, perhaps 3 to 5 levels if my memory serves.

I loved it. I thought it was a good representation, since it wasn't based on total posts (to some degree yes), but for me it was based on my usefulness and proliferation. I don't think proliferation is a bad thing, yes it takes hard drive space, but it encourages more activity.

I was talking about back when there was something like a 'rating: + or -' link on everyone's post, it was based on the usefulness of that particular post and I think there was some variability to the amount of rating you got, perhaps 3 to 5 levels if my memory serves.

That's the old rating system -- it was actually only per-user rather than per-post; you could be rated once by each other user, resulting in a rating score.

We now have "reputation" for users -- you can see underneath your username on the left that (as of the time of my response) you have a score of 16. I think they're planning on adding lots of extra ways of increasing this via different forms of participation, but currently it's affected by a per-post rating system; it's disabled for this forum, the lounge and other areas that are considered off-topic, but if you visit one of the technical forums you'll see each post asks "did you find this helpful?" (or something along those lines), and has a button to "vote up" the post. Some users also have the option to vote a post down if they thought it was unhelpful. All of these scores are added to your overall reputation.

[quote name='TheForgottenMindset' timestamp='1328151585' post='4908600']
I was talking about back when there was something like a 'rating: + or -' link on everyone's post, it was based on the usefulness of that particular post and I think there was some variability to the amount of rating you got, perhaps 3 to 5 levels if my memory serves.

That's the old rating system -- it was actually only per-user rather than per-post; you could be rated once by each other user, resulting in a rating score.

We now have "reputation" for users -- you can see underneath your username on the left that (as of the time of my response) you have a score of 16. I think they're planning on adding lots of extra ways of increasing this via different forms of participation, but currently it's affected by a per-post rating system; it's disabled for this forum, the lounge and other areas that are considered off-topic, but if you visit one of the technical forums you'll see each post asks "did you find this helpful?" (or something along those lines), and has a button to "vote up" the post. Some users also have the option to vote a post down if they thought it was unhelpful. All of these scores are added to your overall reputation.
[/quote]



Ok cool, so yeah that's sounds good and all, but I'd like to see a page where it shows the rankings, like a high scoreboard to make it more gamelike. I'd put it close to the 'Watched Topics' link.