It’s not just a score: click on it and it actually shows you that person’s games.
Like how low post-count only results in people posting nonsense? The WIP is for unfinished crap to begin with. It’s not a good strategy to enforce some minimum level of quality. That would demotivate people to make progress.
You don’t get ‘medals’ ? Positive reinforcement is an incredibly powerful motivator. People will be more helpful if there is the potential of a publicly recognized award for it. What would Facebook be without their Like and Twitter to without Follow. It’s all positive reinforcement, that’s why Facebook doesn’t have, for example, Dislike.
I don’t get what the problem is with the current ‘ranking’. It has always been there… as part of SMF, and just now that there are new names, and a new way to calcluate ranking, the entire concept is flawed? And if you don’t care, why bother complaining? It’s not like it is getting in your way.
As for the argument that post-count is significant for newbies to evaluate somebodies status… isn’t that what the (previous and current) ranking is for? The typical forum links rank to post-count, while that is highly inaccurate. The new JGO system provides a much more in-depth indication of skill / status.
The fact that the ranking calculation is secret, doesn’t mean it’s simple. You seem to assume it’s unbalanced. Can you elaborate?
As people seem to assume the worst of my abilities when I say ‘the formula’ is a secret, let me say this: people trying to game the ranking system will find it damn hard, if not impossible. Math doesn’t lie. To crank up your score with game-topics alone will take over 100 topics, thousands of posts or hundreds of medals. It’s all about balance: a regular visitor that contributes to the forum and releases a handful of games will quickly rise in ranking. Whether you care about that, is up to you, but the majority just does.
I really like the ability to click and see all the games that someone has made. Good work 
Facebook’s Like is to openly support something… yeah I guess its like the medals, but Facebook is a giant network.
And Twitter’s Follow is different, at leats to me, its just to subscribe so that I read what these people are posting - just like RSS subscribtions
Yes it shows how many followers someone has, but does it matter ? Its just statistics…
Liking something or here, giving a medal is only interesting in this aspect “oh person X agrees on that/ likes it” same in Facebook. However how many Likes someone has in total / medals is a worthless statistic - its not even in context. But maybe thats just me… However Facebook does not have “X posts of this user have been liked” it only has a Likes counter on products and groups and such
Well you are changing it - I guess it was “if its broken dont fix it” however I would argue that nobody cared to begin with.
The whole notion of rating users and their posting is just wrong to me - or worthless. One of the other.
Imagine someone pointing out a statistic on how long I need in the bathroom or while parking - as if I have to care
You already made it clear you don’t like it. Why argue about feature A that you didn’t care about, that turned into feature B that you don’t care about? So far you’re the only one being negative. One can’t please everybody.
[quote=“Riven,post:22,topic:40456”]
I care, thereby disproving that statement.
EDIT:
Having a games count is pretty weird. My volumetric lighting test program isn’t a game. Changing it to something more general probably won’t work since that will indeed encourage people to create lots of stuff in the showcase forum, which in turn will cause it to get even less attention than it currently is. I’d therefore say that having nothing is better than this. I think medals and stars are enough. :persecutioncomplex:
The crazy part is, this is the first forum I’ve ever seen take a step in where they are basing the ranking on the “point” of the forum. The point of this forum is to make games and create meaningful posts. Of course, if you’ve been here for a while, things like that will not matter too much. But when it comes to new people looking for help, I think that looking at the members to see how helpful they’ve been is a really great indicator.
The post count is just standardized fluff in most cases. All it really shows is that you have more time to post on a forum than anyone else. There is no way that it tells you the quality of posts, or how well you are able to help others. This system might not be perfect, but it is a step in the right direction and will probably stop all those nonsensical one-liners in their tracks.
Totally supported. Keep it up, Riven.
I propose we create an algorithm to evalute the relevance and aptness of any post to the topic and to this forum, and then to use that evaluation to add to a total point score per user. Each game will be evaluated similarly for completeness and skill.
…nah, too hard. This system is probably the best way that doesn’t require a full scale project.
‘Game count’, ‘Project count’, it’s all the same. I can easily switch it to ‘Projects’, if that feels better. (Edit: Done!)
[quote=“theagentd,post:26,topic:40456”]
Sub-par entries in the Showcase board are kicked back to WIP all the time. Similairly, sub-par entries in the WIP board are kicked to Misc. We don’t need a perfect, autonomous solution - as we can interfere with data directly. (moderation).
The goal is to create an incentive to help others & publish games, which is the whole point of JGO, as ctomni231 correctly pointed out. Members not interested in publishing games (or projects, if you will) will still be valued by their contributions: helping others, or simply by being nice.
I dunno… A few years ago I was doing animation and I frequented a forum which had the most annoying ever kid on it: “wow thts gr8!”, “Loooool!”, " 
:)!" &c. He didn’t get banned because the moderation was very light, and eventually he turned out to be really good and got a job with Aardman Animation - one of the top jobs!
Maybe we could have a ‘yawn’ button as well as an ‘appeciate’ button? Any poster with a ‘0 medals, 999 yawns’ tag won’t get taken very seriously…
@Riven
dunno if this is a one time bug or what
http://thumbnails102.imagebam.com/22645/4a672f226448405.jpg
New member with 0/0/0 is kernel…
I don’t quite get the point you’re trying to make. Similarly ‘annoying kids’ will have the same room to ‘grow’ here too. Nobody is getting banned.
As for ‘yawn’, it’s so dangerous to have negative feedback. People will feel attacked, and as you cannot defend yourself, frustration will build. Others will ‘yawn’ posts in revenge. It easily creates tension, or even a hostile atmosphere.
Back in the day, when ChrisM roamed the forum, he enabled good & bad karma in SMF. It allowed people to either vote +1 or -1 on a member. It was a mess. People got really upset - partly because karma votes were anonymous, so you could easily screw somebody without any retribution or social control.
I don’t think we need a yawn option, then the really annoying kids will just yawn everyone. It’ll be like people who give out too many medals, but worse, because it’s negative.
Thanks, fixed it!
Sorry, of course nobody’s getting banned - I meant to say I would have banned him
I’m not sure that negative feedback is such a bad thing though. On the animation forum the other posters did the job by posting “shut up” posts in reply which often lead to troll wars. My point is that a yawn button doesn’t create a new post, so nobody cares. I’m sure most people will only ‘yawn’ pointless posts - if two kiddies want to yawn each other to death that’s fine! Give a medal to the winner!
People (can) get really emotional about negative feedback. It (probably) leads to equally bad flamewars as the ‘shut up’ would trigger.
IMHO, it’s best to be gentle and do (in order of increasing annoyance)
- nothing
- secretly hide it (JGO currently has a bunch of posts that only the author can see :persecutioncomplex:)
- upon repeated offense, move the post to a ‘name and shame’ thread, which is locked
- delete the post
- ban the user for a few weeks, informing them when they are welcome back
It’s a forum, folks. Lighten up. None of this is on Your Permanent Record.
What about people starting too many threads? I don’t want to start fights by telling people they’re spamming, but I really think that has gotten bad, too. It’s a shame when the signal to noise ratio gets that low on the unread topics page.
Some of the worst kinds of threads, in no particular order:
- People that don’t read the docs for the library they’re using
- Extreme cases of didn’t-use-a-search-engine-before-posting
- How-to questions that are poorly written, aren’t Java related, or are very basic.
- WIP spamming
Semi-rhetorical question: what technological fix would you propose for those problems?
Moderation bots. No wait, that would be Terminator over again.