What do "Points" make...?

DavidDilworth posted on Monday, September 18, 2006

I've just noticed each user now has a number of "points" appearing below the number of posts they've made. 

Look on the left hand side of a post where you see the picture and user stuff.

Could anyone give a brief summary of what they are and how they are accrued?

Should we be excited about getting them?

Brian Criswell replied on Monday, September 18, 2006

I think a post starts at 5 points and increases based on how much discussion it generates (the number of replies).

Edit: Yep.  Your post jumped from 5 to 20 when I responded to it.

RockfordLhotka replied on Tuesday, September 19, 2006

I was digging through the admin pages of the forum software the other day, looking for something else, when I ran across this capability. So I turned it on to see what it did.

I don't know that there's any real value to it, but I don't think it hurts anything either. The one bit of value it provides is that you can, if you want, see which people have contributed most to the community through posting replies.

There's a relatively sophisticated point system behind the scenes, where different actions on the site are given different weight.

The software can also give "badges" to people who post a lot (little icons by the poster's name). I was hoping that they could be related to these points - but unfortunately not... Which seems silly, but there you have it.

On the other hand, version 2.1 is available, so I'll upgrade to that at some point in here, and maybe that makes better use of these points.