Community Credit Forums

DavidSilverlight, are you the one that goes through and approves all the points that are submitted to the site? Or, do you have a few volunteers that have the ability to do so?

Also, why don't you have it setup so that others in the community can approve point submissions? You could implement it so that anyone can approve someones submissions, but it takes a minimum of like 10 votes for it to actually be approved. Then you could also have some "moderator" members that are allowed to automatically approve any points submitted by other members.

Hey Chris,

       It depends.   Last month, for example, Chris Hammond was great to help out.  A few others have helped throughout the years and there are some folks that have offered, but I have not spent time with to walk them through the approval processing portion. 

       I really do like the idea of having more of a community oriented approval system.  I have to work out the details on how to do that successfully.  If done right, it can help things run much smoother than having a few people approving submissions.  At the same time, there is some potential for abuse if not careful.  I would love to discuss the concept further.   We can try to bounce around some idea here (others can join in) or take it offline via email. 

This is probably the best forum to discuss this, since it effects the community that uses this site and anyone can suggest any ideas.

I'm kind of thinking similarly to how StackOverflow.com works. If it takes 10 up votes to approve a submission, then maybe users could vote down in a way to revoke a submission within a certain period of time of it getting approved. Each user could get only a certain number of votes (up or down) that they could use per day; this could keep someone from voting down everyone elses submissions all at once if they were to try to do so to "game" the system. Also, each user could only vote once per submission.

The "scoring" per the voting system could work like an actual score. Up votes add 1, and Down votes subtract 1. Once you reach 10 you get approved, then to get revoked you'd have to get enough down votes to get you back down to 0.

And the magic number that determines approval and revocation could be modified as necessary to keep people from gaming the system, or making it too hard to get approved. Also, there could be a way for users to report abuse so that a moderator could review the submission and its votes further.

Just some more thoughts. It actually sounds a bit complicated, but would work for a nicely "automated" system run by the community at large.

Totall unrelated, but I went to StackOverflow just now and noticed that the first question was:  "How do I convince my coworker that methods with 26 parameters are bad practice?"  Hilarious!

I do think that it is a great idea.  So let's bounce around some ideas.....

 a) The idea of x number of up/down votes, submitted by the community, I think is a good idea.  One subtle, but important, aspect of approving submissions is that people often submit entries under the wrong category.  For example, somebody might submit an article as a "long article", which is worth many more points.   We would need a way for people to not just approve/disapprove, but also for a way for them to be put into another category.  Perhaps one thought would be to have a "category flag" that people could submit for the admins to review and put into another category.

 b) Since there are alot of submissions per month, and people are often busy with their day jobs and lives, there may be months where not all submissions are voted on.  What do you think we should do in cases like that?  It would be a bit unfair if somebody wrote a book, for example, but did not get enough votes for credit.   Perhaps the admins could have the option to automatically "count" those if they vote for them.

 c) There are some sites that automatically submit entries.  GeeksWithBlogs is one great example.  Currently, those submissions are automatically approved since they are essentially technichal blogs that don't normallly need reviewing.

 Those are just some thoughts that come to mind for me....

I don't know how stackoverflow works, but I would think that you need accountability for what people vote for. To try and avoid abusing the system, make people accountable for when they vote for something, track/display who has voted for/against an item.

After reviewing the points from last month it amazed me at all the grey items that are submitted, It'll be interesting to see how the voting goes.

Yes, very true.  That is actually one of the most time consuming areas as Chris has seen.  In fact, one of the reasons that it has not been automated up to this point is to make sure that submissions are approved in the right category.   I think that the community oriented approach could help, but I think that it will be important to have a way to handle cases where folks are approving submissions inappropriately.   I think that it will be important for us to come up with a system to make sure that votes are legit and not just a) friends of the submitter  or b) people with bad judgement. Perhaps coming up with better definitions for some of the categories will make the job easier.  Currently it is somewhat subjective.

Items that don't get enough votes to diffinitively tell whether they're approved or unapproved after a certain "long" period of time could be an issue. One way to handle this could be to automatically flag it for moderator review some how. Or, there could be some kind of "reward" system that could grant points to people that vote up or down an item like this; that would give the community incentive to vote for these stale items.

Talking about incentive, I guess there would have to be some kind of point reward for those that spend a lot of time reviewing and voting (up or down) for items too. It shouldn't be too many points for voting, but it should definitely count as community participation.

As for the "trusted" sites that automatically submit entries, I don't see any reason to not automatically approve their entries. However, it would be good to maybe still allow the community to vote them down for revocation, possibly.

If items are submitted in the wrong category, it would work to let uses flag it for moderator review. However, a better idea would maybe let the users click "category flag" and then vote for the new category that it should be. Then if enough users flag it in the same new category the site could automatically change the items category.

Yes, I agree that accountability should be a big thing with the voting system. It wouldn't hurt to show the users that flagged an item to change it to another category, but showing who voted something down may cause flame wars in some cases. One thing that StackOverflow.com does is it grants users more rights to do different things once their total score reaches certain levels. This way new or really casual users can't do to much harm, and the more "trustworthy" users with more points can help moderate the site in a way.