Member of the Month award

Not a bad idea actually

 

Not to stiffle this idea but lets refrain from the voting until this is "decided" otherwise we're gonna have a flood of votes and nothing official to do with them heehee

 

We have had a similar idea before and have most likely a solution for how to implement this as well, in terms of forum posts. We'll look into this one, but as always, have patience..

 

At least a pen ... lol

I don't think a member of the month is needed. The members who do make a difference are rewarded when the people they help are successful. And there are alot of members helping alot of people. So how would you even choose just one?

Last, I think one of the best rewards would be becoming a Senior or Addict.

 

Kinda a bit of both. I for one go through enough posts a day to know that there are a crapload of really good posters out there. Perhaps the selection process might be simpler if we broke things down into "categories" -- 'sides it's not really fair considering some of the long-time members here have developed a posting "style" and technique which has been refined over hundreds of posts heehee.

I would tend to say that it is possible to discrimnate and eventually come up with a "top" poster -- but the things is, by the time whoever objectively comes up with that decision, it will be long past that month heehee. 'sides I dunno about the other Mods (and other heavy posters), I for one simply dont have enough time to go through and read up on posts etc... after awhile however I do get a sense for who is a good contributer and who isnt ... and then I make reccommendations for Senior/Addict promotions.

Just spitballing an idea, perhaps we could have a system or something where Seniors/Addicts/Mods can, at sometime during a given week, "vote" for a newbie/junior/member and whoever "wins" that week gets a promotion or ... a .. uh.... stick .... of... uh.... cheese? I certainly see the potential for elitism with this kind of idea and although it's not my intent, the potential is there and on the scale of thousands of users, I honestly don't think it will show up in the end. This idea would avoid the potential for hundreds of junk Newbie accounts setup in order to "vote". Just an idea.

No time! LOL

 

If we were going to have something like this, and I'm not convinced we should for the reasons others have mentioned, it would probably better to have something like a button at either the top or bottom of each post with a caption like "I Found This Post Helpful". The poster of the month could then be selected from the posts that got the most clicks. It's not necessarily more fair than other methods, but it would at least be an attempt to base it on how helpful a poster has been, and let's face it, that's the most important thing.

 

True but there is an incredible amount of "spam-voting" potential with that kind of idea

 

Very true, which is another problem with the idea in general. My biggest concern is that the Senior Members and Afterdawn Addicts would be the ones getting the award most of the time. I don't others to feel like the focus of the site is on a few people. In the end I just don't know that there's a good way to implement this in a way that wouldn't ultimately be counter-productive to the idea of having a friendly community of peers.

 

Yeah indeed which is why i would think it to be useful for the award to goto newbies/juniors/members only

 

No arguments there.

 

Something that I've wondered, it sorta has its roots in Slashdot/etc style, but with aD-specific twist.

Each post would have a subtle 1-5 easy-to-click quickie voting thingy above it (on the same bar where the other "stuff" is as well). Clicking a voting would add the vote (or in case of user not being logged in, it redirects user to login or register first, so no anonymous votes here) to the database. But. But the voting would also have priorities. Newbie votes for some post and votes for "2". This would get added once -- one vote and vote is "2" for post X. Ok, now Senior Member votes the same post and gives "3". But Senior Member has 5 times more "power" than Newbie, so the vote would actually be inserted 5 times to the database (to get the averages, etc correctly). So, now the post would have total of 6 votes: 2, 3, 3, 3, 3 and 3. Obviously one user can vote for one post only once.

After each month, a little scriptiethingythatisyettobecoded would go through every vote during that month, get the averages for each post and shows the results for "best post". But it could also be tweaked to show "best user" with somekinda funk-ee algorithm (whatever it would be? List only users with minimum of 10 messages during that month THAT have been voted for (each one of them) minimum of 10 times AND that have total average points more than 3.00 and order by the average points and get the top one?). Yes, I am a programmer..

 

Seems like a good idea however I would hope it would be one vote per "term" becuase it wouldnt really make sense to have multiple "bests" from one person (and again we have the potential for spam-accounts)

Now considering this to be post of the month, having one vote for the entire month .... would that make sense considering that we may not (a) be able to predict the future or (b) have the time to go over all the posts in the last month on the last day of the month?

Perhaps we can get one vote per week and then either (a) change it to poster of the week or (b) do it per originally planned but now with just 4 times the number of votes to process?

Course we could make things interesting by adding (a) that the lowest voted score cannot be less than a 2 (b) there must be at least one vote from at least 2 "ranks", etc ... i'm a programmer too ... like to complicate things

 

I'd say each user can vote for as many posts as they ever want to, so there wouldn't be any limit on number of votes. That way, this would also eventually allow searches like "search only for posts with avg points of 3.00 or more".

I like the "exclude posts with votes less than 3" as well, it would nicely remove various attempts to manipulate the figures upwards. Specifically if the rule would be something like "exclude posts that have votes for less than 3 and those vote/s are made by users with status of Member or higher", which would sorta allow "more senior members" to act as "vote cops" by simply tagging b.s. posts by voting "1" for them.

And I agree, making life a complicated, but ah so full of boolean logic, hell is the deadly sin #1 of virtually all programmers

 

So I could vote for Person X ten times?

 

You could vote for 10 different posts by user X. The votes would be post-specific, not user specific. But the "user chart" could be created based on the votes for various posts by those users (as well as the chart for best forum posts).