alternate point systems

  • Was going through some forum posts and was noticing a trend - questions on the forum often don't get an answer marked.  I think that this may be due to lack of incentive for it.
    Is it possible to have a counter for the number of answered posts?

    I know some users will not like going back to their posts to mark things as answered (some don't even go back to let you know if your suggestion worked or not), but having an incentive for answered posts might help get people to use that.
    Also, having a penalty type system for when users post things incorrectly would be nice.  I am thinking the posts that lack useable detail or posts that get created, get responses and never have the end user reply.
    For the ignored posts, it could be a system that detects a topic with no answer marked, last comment was not made by the OP, and the OP has not updated the post with any more detail in a week.  That gets you a "bad poster" point.
    For users who post questions and don't follow the rules (not posting DDL when DDL would be required) gets you a bad poster point, BUT only the first person to respond after the OP could give people "bad poster points".  This would reduce the chance of the system being abused.
    Having the bad points expire I think is a good way to get around the newbies being forever shamed for making bad posts.  Posts from 10 years ago that are marked as "bad" should not contribute to the current poster who makes a lot of good posts due to their new knowledge of SQL server.

    And then to add to the incentive for users to mark things as answered - have a counter beside their name for "unanswered" posts.

    I believe that the above would help clean up the forum as well.  There are several posts that I have found where a user has a problem and they get a solution and you never hear back if it worked.  This leads others to find the forum post but makes them hesitant to try the solution suggested as they have no clue if it worked or not.

    The above is all just my opinion on what you should do. 
    As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it.  Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
    I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.

  • Interesting thoughts. Let me kick it around a bit.

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