Point amnesty now..

Email me for it

Published on August 5, 2005 By Draginol In Blogging

In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site. Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log.

I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant.

Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know the easiest way to get lots of points -- get other sites to link to what I write which brings lots of readers. I have many articles with over 50,000 points for instance that have only a couple of comments. All because people came here to read them.

But many others have taken other routes that we're aware of to get their points up. That's going to come to an end soon as all scores will be recalculated based on what is actually present on JU.

Comments (Page 1)

bakerstreet

on Aug 05, 2005

My wife is Harumph, so don't think she is an alternate personality .

Just to clarify, what is the amnesty? I assume the re-tabulation goes forward, so are there going to be actions taken beyond the re-tabulation? I think it is cool you are doing this. Kudos.

SATYROBE

on Aug 05, 2005

No matter what u do I know it will be good for the site. And that is more important than any personal short time advantage of mine.

Phoenixboi

on Aug 05, 2005

Thanks for listening Brad.. this is going to solve alot of problems and will make JU a better place to be.

Manopeace

on Aug 05, 2005

I think it's exceedingy generous of you not to demand a public confession in order to be forgiven, allowing certain guilty parties to save face. What will the penalty be for those who have cheated and don't email you for the amnesty? Just curious....

Before I read this thread I emailed this to one of the moderators.... it is far from an admission of 'guilt'.

Hi Cordelia.... this is Manopeace...
I need help.....
I havn't seen you around lately so I wonder if you are aware of the new flame war going on at JoeUser.... I have been accused by LittleWhip of abusing the points system and cheating on it to attain my high ranking in the Top Blog Spots.... This 'war' has been going on for about a week now and is dominating the discussions on the site.
I can honestly tell you that in no way did I do anything to manipulate my points. I have no idea how or why my ranking is so high, but there must be a way to find out and finally put an end to the nonsense that is going on.
Can I ask you to get someone to do an audit of my blog? To see where those points are coming from, to see if the numbers really reflect the amounts I should have.
Until now, I have had a fairly good reputation with most of the regular bloggers on the site, but this character assasination of me is ruining that. I feel uncomfortable even 'showing my face' there until this is cleared up.
I know that this is probably not a part of your job description, but I also know that you have the connections at Stardock to know who can help in this matter.
Please try to help, you have no idea how much it will be appreciated, not only by me, but by others that are tired of what is going on there.
Thank you!

Dr Guy

on Aug 05, 2005

Just to clarify, what is the amnesty?

I second the question. What is Amnesty? If anyone is found guilty, does it mean confinement to their own blog? Just curious. And Audit away! I guess I am low enough now that it wont make much difference to me. But along with the audit, can we request an analysis of our scores? I would be very interested in seeing how I got up over 20k points a few weeks ago.

Moderateman

on Aug 05, 2005

another point, just how do you count points given to an article that also adds points to the responder?

you get 5 , I get 5 just how do you seek that out and tabulate it all?

ShadowWar

on Aug 05, 2005

I would like the powers that be to address the user levels along with the points. As a level 4 stardock user, but level 1 JU I was wondering if they could make a clearer way of being higher levels, or maybe associating it with you Stardock status? Would be easy to do. Since points are based partially on your access level, then its an important part of the point system.

ShadowWar

on Aug 05, 2005

Here is the explination given in JU FAQ:

When someone selects your article to be read (i.e. intentionally goes to it) your article gets 1 point. When your article is read as part of a home page (such as the JoeUser.com home page or the home page of your blog) it gets 1/10th of a point (shares the point with the other articles).

When an anonymous user responds to an article it gets a point. When a registered user responds to an article (other than you) it gets 5 points.

A user can also rate an article as "Interesting" or "Insightful". Interesting = Your access class squared. Insightful = 2 X Your access class squared. Where an anonymous user is access class 1, a registered user 2, an admin is 10. As we finish things up, trusted users will be granted higher access classes (3, 4, 5, etc.). A user with access class 3 giving an article a "interesting" rating would give that article 9 points. Or in the case of an Insightful rating, 18 points.

Top articles for the day, week, month and 90 days are tracked and we use this info to highlight these top scoring articles.

Point System: Blog Sites
The # of points all your articles have together determine # of points for your blog. Eventually there will be listings for top blog sites of the month and such as well.

Point System: Users
This part is still not nailed down which is why we haven't published this yet. When you write a blog you get some points. When you comment on a blog or in the forum you get some points. If a user says your comment is insightful you get bonus points. If, however, they say you're trolling you lose points. How many points you get is heavily based on your access level (an anonymous user saying your trolling won't really do anything). The amount is the 2X(access level -1). So an anonymous user saying yay or nay gives no points. A regular user can give + or - 2 points.

So that's basically the system right now.

Daiwa

on Aug 05, 2005

I'll gladly donate all my meager points to anyone who feels underpointed, or to a pool of points to be shared by all, or to be shared according to a prorated formula based on...

Cheers,
Daiwa

Dr Guy

on Aug 05, 2005

I'll gladly donate all my meager points to anyone who feels underpointed, or to a pool of points to be shared by all, or to be shared according to a prorated formula based on...

I'll second that. Anyone feeling they are point poor can share mine as well.

whatever

on Aug 05, 2005

I never understood the purpose of the points system and why anyone would care. I still dont get it but it appears to make some happy.

bakerstreet

on Aug 05, 2005

I'm just curious if amnesty means they get to keep their bogus points, or if it averts some punishment, or what?

SATYROBE

on Aug 05, 2005

Instead of fighting here again, consider u are given 10 days to edit ur articles and comments. Of course even that turns up in Draginols log, but it is a lot of work for him to go through the whole log of everybodys he may not always have time for.

You cannot remove comments. So they must stay more or less like they are quoted, in fact for technical reasons I dont even recommend altering quoted comments. And turning the contents of comments around 180 degrees makes nothing make sense anymore in peoples responses. Technically, you CAN remove ALL COMMENTS to your article if you remove the article as well. If you have sites on JU and WC, JU dominates WC better than vice versa.

Then Draginol can either troll the rest with 100 points each as often as he wants too, after that he can still change the score or ban u etc., whatever. Sounds like he will sometimes try to only count (automatically or not) the substance left over either technically or as far as contents are concerned. Only this will probably give new score, so either he trolls afterwards or u shouldnt worry about trolling at all.

Isn´t this the ideal time to completely remove articles or update and cautiously change comments, as mentioned above, concentrating more on shortening than reversing, unless quoted where u leave at least quoted passages in if you think in the new rating ur article or comment causes more punishment than rewards?

This is how we relearn to edit and make anything new the right way, we dont have to judge ourselves anymore, and measures we take against any other user backfire. Before you have cleaned up your own back yard, shut up no matter who talks bad or good about you.

On your own sites here, this is the last time you can judge urselves, judging other users here is almost down unless u do not ab/misuse the current rating system, which is also logged already and always ways, for admins only, they wrote (might be a bluff, I dont think so, plus do you want to play around with that?). I need this site to work better for my customers even if I am not only banned but removed the customer list. There is a limited amount of big sites to recommend to my readers in the future, especially in this specific sub field. Anything u have not cleaned up here now will also be read by people u recommend going here from external sites of yours.

Writing this for u could also get me banned, hope u make something out of it, the more u quote this here, the more u might get this thread off topic. The more questions u ask here, the less per cent he will be able to answer fast, and the slower he can make improvements. After the change, most questions will be explained anyway

Draginol

on Aug 05, 2005

What is amnesty?

The system will be flagging users whose calculated new scores are FAR less than what they had on here. At that point, we'll likely look at exactly how that happened and put in major penalities for those users. Anyone who emails me on the subject saying what they did and how they did it will be granted amnesty.

Dr Guy

on Aug 05, 2005

Anyone who emails me on the subject saying what they did and how they did it will be granted amnesty.

When I was working on the local school system, some kids hacked into our servers. Normally, that would have been an automatic 2 week suspension, but we bargained it down to 3 days if they showed us how to do it. Sounds like the same thing here.

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!