Forum Reputation System

GameDev.net has a reputation system on their forums which has many advantages. It strongly motivates users to publish deep, informative posts. People are forever chasing higher reputation scores in order to drive their social prestige. Implementing a similar system here would benefit whole Unity community. It would boost quality of most posts and all users would be much more motivated to share their expertise. This in turn would allow everybody to find better answers to their problems through Google. The ultimate result of implementing such system could be general rise of quality of all games made with Unity. This could have a large long-term impact on the community. Another advantage of such system is that it would allow much easier evaluation of post quality. For ex. if somebody posted something controversial, users would be able to judge the post by checking reputation level of the poster. Currently there is only "like" system which motivates people to post something which can be popular. What people need are not "likable" posts, but wise posts which deeply educate, motivate, advise or entertain. Such new reputation system could have honor badge system, something like: "Novice", "Veteran", "Expert", "Master". There could also be a tiny Asset Store discount attached to higher badges. This would make people chase reputation like crazy, driving overall post quality sky high.

 

NO.

 

Why? XD

 

The forum already works fine.

 

Some people favor positive reinforcement. I prefer negative reinforcement. What ought to be done is this: post can only receive downvotes. If you get too many down votes, Unity hacks your computer, finds embarrassing photos, and displays them publicly and forever.

This will bring out the best in everybody.

 

What? I'm not going to spend hours and hours helping people to get a "small discount" when I could just do one more hour of paid work...

I spend time here because I like it and/or because it's a way to keep in touch with other devs, not out of the desire for any reward.

I do see where you're coming from in regards to having people recognised as novice/veteran and so on. There's the real possibility that it could help newbies identify the difference between people who know what they're talking about and people who just sound like they know what they're talking about.

My question is, as far as implementation is concerned, how and why it will end up being materially different to the "likes" system that's already in place? (To be clear, I'm not familiar with their system as I haven't been there in quite some time.) Your problem with "likes" is reasonable, but the problem isn't with "likes" themselves, it's with what people choose to like. That's a cultural concern rather than a function concern, and if people are going to "like" stuff that's superficial then what's to say that they'd "rep" things any differently?

 

This is a terrible idea, and you are a horrible person.
You should probably also change your passwords, the Unity hackers are coming.

 

I think they're just a person with very different experience to us. I get the impression there's a military background there, where negative reinforcement seems to be the norm, and seems to get results.

 

I was just joking.

 

I was not.

I have had bad experience's with these stupid features. (Most) of it was undeserved. In the end such a thing would only serve to designate who is most liked and who is most disliked (rep bombing anyone??).

 

Likes are already tracked, just click members and go to the most likes tab.

That's about all we need around here. What's kind of free community would it be if people were only participating for their own personal gain?

 

You would be joking, because you're a joke. A sad, sad little joke. I'm saving up some downvotes for you once my genius system is put into place.

 

Go over to answers. They have the karma system. It works pretty much as you describe. I was there for a while, but I came over here because I prefer the less formal environment.

Ultimately these systems aren't ever much good. The way humans work, they tend to reward volume of posting, rather then quality.

 

No, look at stackoverflow for the reasons.

 

My only problem with stack is googling something, landing on a stack page, and its been closed because "the question has been answered elsewhere and that they should google it"

I did, nerd.

But on topic, The likes.
Should they go under the post count under your username.
Not saying yay or nay, as that answer is psychologically intricate, but its forum fodder

 

The other problem regarding said reputation feature is that it's just a number. If your reputation is to be a jerk to most everyone, that isn't reflected. All that can be inferred from the idea is whether you're well liked or disliked.

It turns the boards into a popularity contest.

I have doubts that any feature like that would boost quality posts. Define "quality". Realistically the only thing that's going to happen what I just mentioned.

Who wants the boards to be an uber serious place anyway? Why not have silly, stupid, posts and stuff like that? A reputation feature just says to anyone who visits "We only want serious conversations here, and cool people only".

 

When I'm not joking, I'm in agreement with Braineeee here.

I'm pretty sure 75% of my likes are from silly posts.

 

I'm sorry if I came off sounding like an asshole. This suggestion brought back some bad memories and I am kinda grumpy this morning too.

FYI: Rep bombing occurs when a mass of people get together to down-rep a particular person's reputation. Its worse when the board administrators are complicit in the action. Not that I would expect that here.

 

I agree with the post above this one

I think I deserve a like

 

Consider if someone has two accounts on the both side in a bombing thread, like hedging in stock, it's hard to lose. Btw, those thread is probably the best place for karma/reputation charging.

Anyway, ask the same question on different forum may get different result, it's democracy from wide range bias, which is not totally a bad thing.

 

Ugh...I ad NO to the discussion. We went that way once, when Unity decided to create this horrible candy colored new forum full of gamefication. The forum users gamed the gamefication and it turned out very badly. Fortunately, some smart person at Unity decided to go back to our forums.

We like it the way it is. We are intelligent people, many of us professionals, many serious hobbyists, and others who are learning Unity. We do not need popularity contests, or silly manipulation to get us to post deep posts. Look around. There is a lot here and a lot of very good discussions.

Discounts? No. Assets are not that expensive. If one needs to spend hours on the forums to get $2 off an asset, then they need to rethink what it means to be a game developer. Make games, make art, make prototypes, get to work.

 

It's possible to make such system reliable. For ex. there would be no down-voting of any kind, so no "rep-bombing". You would be able rate each post using classic Amazon's five star system. By default each post would get 3 stars. People would always strive to get five stars. You would be able to judge a person by checking their average post rating. For ex. if somebody has an average rating above 4 it would mean that his posts are generally much better than average. People could also mark a post as "helpful" which would affect reputation. There are many cool ways to implement such system.

I'm surprised that most of you oppose this idea. To me it's an obvious improvement. Of course it matters a lot how it would be implemented in detail, but it can be done and it could improve forum experience in a major way.

 

lets say ive got a 5 star rating
lets say someone asks "Can I make a gigantic open world MMO battle royale turn based RPG in Vr with ultra graphics with my Tandy 1000"
I say "Yes, you can"
They then spend three years trying to get this project set up, because a 5 star gave them the go-ahead.

 

If you would have 5-star rating it would mean that your posts are always excellent. That means that you would never tell a newbie to shoot himself in the foot. That's trolling, not 5-star behavior.

 

but a history of good answers(on purpose, for the sake of a great trolling op later, or naturally, as a real attempt to help) cant correlate with future posts

 

I highly appreciate your purity, it's very good.
Try to run your own forum with this system, and see if there are any abuse.

 

First off, the ability to rate a post lower than its intrinsic 3-star value is literally the same thing as down-voting.

Additionally, angrypenguin already provided a question you need to answer:

We like stuff we agree with. We like stuff we find witty. We like stuff we find informative. We like stuff to suck up.

Who's to say the same thing doesn't happen with a "reputation" system? How do you keep all of these things from being incorporated into the rating (which would make the final value worthless to a new user--if a person only posts dank dev memes and gets high ratings because of that, are they a good source of anything but dank dev memes?) It's the way Reddit operates, it's the way StackOverflow occasionally operates, and it's definitely the way this place would operate.

Answer angrypenguin's question first and foremost.

Edit: I do see a possibility here: if when you up-voted and down-voted you had to rate the entire post by picking from a tailored list (this post gets 4 stars for accuracy, 3 stars for usefulness, and 2 stars for dank dev meme levels) or something, you might eventually build a model. This person averages 1 star for accuracy but 5 stars for dank dev memes, so I know what kind of content I'm getting from them.

Of course this is also a problem because you're trying to condense a person's knowledge in a hundred areas down to a single averaged value. Ask me about machine learning and my only answer will be "19." Ask me about the structure of water or the effects of gravity vs. molecular attraction or QSARs and I can give insightful answers. Trying to compile both of these things into a single metric is reductive.

Of course, to deal with that you might categorize posts by reading them and saying "okay, Kiwasi is talking about programming here, neoshaman is talking about game design here, and EA is posting dank dev memes again." Then you categorize according to all that so when a person rates my post replying "19" to a machine learning question, they're 1-starring the funny level of my dank dev memes category.

And that's just going too far. Unless you have machine learning. If so...19.

 

"Likes" could stay. One simple system could work something like this. Each person accumulates likes, like now. However, when you "like" a post it would add a number of forum score points to your account based on YOUR OWN number of likes. This means that if you have tons of likes then your opinion would weight MUCH more.This simple system would make people with the most "likes" more influential. Those reputation points could be named simply "forum score" to make it sound more neutral. Another good idea would be displaying "Score" below your avatar below "Posts" count. You would be able to glance at that score and immediately judge somebody by comparing their post count and forum score. This kind of system is trivial, but still much better than the current solution.

 

It correlates, if you have decent personal integrity. Integrity can also be measured .

 

Well, what if giving a "like" was harder and required justification? Nothing too gnarly, just maybe... Click "Like", have a popup for "Reason" and you pick from stuff like "Technical", "Project Management", "Graphics" and so on..?

Then "Witty" or "Funny" or "Encouraging" could also be reflected, giving onlookers an idea of not just how popular someone is but also why.

Just throwing an idea around, of course. In the vast majority of cases I've always thought that individuals speak for themselves pretty clearly for anyone who looks, and no simple system will fix the other cases.

 

But that's just a number. In human terms, how is it any different to the just-a-number that we already have, which is already not on display?

And more to the point, people could still go around racking up score for exactly the same reasons they get score right now, so I'm not seeing how it'll encourage technical accuracy or depth of responses any more than the current system does.

 

We get a lot of posts where the OP posts an idea and it gets posts saying why it is not a good idea and then the OP follows up with why we are all wrong. lol I am sure we are all aware of this (and we all do it sometimes). But sometimes I wonder if the only reason some do this is to get more posts in their post column.

The point is, Unity tried this, it failed miserably. Those of us who were here remember it clearly. The members of the Unity forums overwhelmingly hated the new forums, for a variety of reasons. But the gamefication was a huge reason. I see no reason why they would try it again.

Just recalling the way it hurt the community during the time and the backlash directed toward the Unity community folks, I never want to see that again. Within a short time, Unity made the decision to revert to the old forums. I am sure it cost them a lot of time and money and hurt the reputation of many.

So...it was tried, it did not work. Down voting is one of the worst things ever. People already do that on the Asset store reviews and look at the trouble we have with that? Fans of specific developers will down vote every review on the store, just to hide good reviews and they will even post bad reviews in a competitors review section just to hurt their ratings. It is crazy and if that were to happen on the forum, it would only create a negative rather than a positive community. If you do not like what someone says, then tell them in words, post a reply. Having the ability to simply hate without having to explain is not something we need in a forum that values maturity and intelligence.

I have no fear Unity will try this road again, at least not for a very long time. Might be better to find a new cause.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-mirror-season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap

My son mentioned this. I might watch it.