As you've probably already noticed, we put out an update to the central Stardock Forum system today that comes packed with fixes, plus a handful of very useful new features. Instead of letting you guess randomly at what's new and how it works, I thought I'd give everyone a quick run-down of the new features.
Forum Announcements
In the past, we've been unable to let everyone know when there's a major bit of system maintenance coming up. If it was important enough, we'd run around to all the sites and make a front page news posting about it and hoped that people would see it.
Now, we can set a broadcast message that appears at the top of ALL forum pages. We can set these on a site-by-site basis.
Clicking on the Read More link will open a message with further details (if available).
Beyond the announcements, you'll notice a bunch of new buttons on forum comments...
Return to Top Button
Every comment has this little arrow now. Clicking it will return you to the top of the page.
Report Post
The report post feature returns. It is limited to logged in users only, and you must provide a detailed reason for the report. We'll know if you're spamming it, and we will hurt you if you do!
Give Karma
This is a completely new feature for the forums. In the past, we had the "Insightful" and "Informative" buttons, but in actuality, they didn't do anything (rather, they had once long ago, but not in the last 2+ years). So with the new forums we decided to add a real karma system. Now, you can give comments a rating if you found them particularly good or helpful.
Karma Points are shown under your user picture on the left of your posts along with your user number and online status.
See that little number? You can click on it to see a report on when you received karma, on which posts, and why people gave you the rating.
As you receive more points, the list will grow. You'll see your overall stats at the top with score and number of ratings received.
It's important to note that there is no way to rate someone DOWN. You can only give kudos to folks so it's a 100% positive system.
Here are the limitations on giving karma:
The points themselves don't DO anything yet, but there are ideas being kicked around on what we can do with these points. For now, it's a nice way to recognize people for their contributions on the forums.
So those are the major updates for the forums for April. If you have any questions, let us know!
I got Karma, how cool.
Thanks for the updates
I wont say that it was the BEST business decision Brad ever made to hire Zoomba, but it is up there!
I think you missed part of my description of the Karma System.
There's no rating people down. There is no way to be negative with the system, or to use it to punish anyone. It is purely, 100% a positive thing. If you never receive Karma, it's not because you're being singled out or attacked, since anyone can give you karma for any reason, and no one can take it away.
Or are you talking about reporting? It's used to report TOS violations, spammers, trolls etc. Reporting a post doesn't automatically kill it. A mod/admin still has to look at it and make a decision. All it does is draw our attention to problems we'd likely find anyway on a regular patrol of the forums. It's just more effecient.
There's nothing in the update which discourages discussion or participation. If anything, they encourage more and better participation since quality posts will get Karma points, and violation posts will be cleared off in a more effecient manner.
Oh and for people concerned over abuse of the system... Since Karma points do not provide any real advantage aside from maybe bragging rights, who cares if someone rates a friend up every 10min for days on end?
At a maximum, this means someone could get 720 points in a 24hr period. That would assume a master-level user sat down and every 10 minutes gave the maximum +5 rating they could give (I can give a +9 for example as a top-level admin)
But chances are, people who would abuse the system like that would be citizens, so you're looking at a maximum of 144 points in a day from one user with no life.
Or more accurately, someone may do this every few days for like 30 minutes. Unless someone was truely dedicated to boosting the numbers, and had a relatively high access level, you're talking maybe a dozen or so "artificial" points before folks get bored and move on.
While there are ideas floating around, there are no details on them yet. If we do take the karma points and do something with them, you can bet there will be controls put in place. Think of this as Phase 1.
Phase 2 could have a way of averaging out points to prevent abuses.
Example that was kicked around in a discussion in the office the other day :
Points awarded over the last 30 days divided by some number based on number of posts made.
This means you have to be a recent poster to keep your score. If you leave the site for more than a month, your score basically could be reset. This rewards ongoing participation.
Then there's the division by some number derived from the number of posts you made in the 30 day period. This, to some extent, would encourage people to focus more on meaningful posts beyond "me too!" all over the place. It wouldn't be a division purely by number of posts as that would actually discourage participation as it decreased the score, but it would be some small value that would try and balance out people who would just try to spam the forums for points from friends.
This is of course a massive over-simplification of the idea, but it serves as an example of the sort of things that can be done to counteract any attempts at spamming points.
And of course we could limit you to rating the same person up no more than once per day. We could also slowly devalue the karma points awarded based on how often you rate that person up versus other people. Like if you only rate 3 people all the time, eventually the points you give them become virtually worthless.
I personally see the future of the Karma Points system as a way to identify exceptionally helpful, friendly or interesting people in the forums, and somehow highlight them to the rest of the community. Would a good score give people special forum powers or privledges? No. We will always tightly control who can do any administrative action. Would it maybe give them a pretty "Community Helper" badge under their name? Maybe. Would it give them software for free, t-shirts, or anything of monetary value? Almost definitely not.
The act of recognizing an individual for making a positive contribution does not necessarily encourage conformity. Its not like having 1000 karma points will ever give you something super-special that the guy with 10 karma points doen't get. It's not like withholding a point can be used to punish someone. My saying "I like X" does not in any way devalue "Y" It doesn't punish "Y" for being different from "X"
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
