Rating/Forum Systems

[Joseph Hammer <parrhesiajoe(at)gmail.com>]

I've been browsing rating systems to find a few I like.

Programming and Cooking.

A good community forum contains a means to rank the relative importance of different peoples' input.

Some of the most useful things in history were the result of the community creating a system that served its needs.

StackOverflow.com, Allrecipes.com, and several movie rating sites had okay rating systems, but by far the most useful is the system at StackOverflow.

Here's a snippet. There's real gold here, if someone wants to dig for it. I will do an analysis in March... I'm only doing a prelim for someone else right now, but this appears to be close to acceptable as a mechanism to abstract into a holistic, productive system. If anyone wants to do a deconstructive analysis of the ruleset before I get to it, I would be interested in hearing it. Stack has a very low bar for participation. Everyone can post questions, but you have to do a little work before you can vote things up or down (very little work).

Higher participation wins you badges and new capabilities in the system. I believe a participatory system should have many of the same features...

Thoughts?

http://stackoverflow.com/faq

All the following is from that page.

What is reputation?

Reputation is completely optional. Normal use of Stack Overflow — that is, asking and answering questions, or submitting an edit — does not require any reputation whatsoever.

If you’d like to help us run Stack Overflow, you’ll need to earn some reputation first. Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing fellow users that you know what you’re talking about.

The primary way to gain reputation is by posting good questions and useful answers. Your peers will vote on your posts, and those votes will cause you to gain (or, in rare cases, lose) reputation:

answer is voted up	+10
question is voted up	+5
answer is accepted	+15	(+2 to acceptor)
post is voted down	-2	(-1 to voter)

A maximum of 30 votes can be cast per user per day, and you can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day (although accepted answers and bounty awards are immune to this limit). Please note that votes for posts marked "community wiki" do not generate reputation.

The other way to gain reputation is by suggesting edits to existing posts as a new registered user. Each edit will be peer reviewed, and if it is accepted, you will earn +2 reputation. You can only earn a maximum of +1000 total reputation through suggested edits, however.

Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions:

15	Vote up
15	Flag offensive
50	Leave comments†
100	Edit community wiki posts