I've dealt with a money system on my own forum, and have seen other forums that employ a money system. More often then not, those systems cause more headache and grief than a positive contribution to the community. Personally and overall, I don't see it as worthwhile when moderators have to start policing people on the suspicion of trying to earn more money through message padding, spamming, etc. It's more effort than it's worth.

To compromise, however, I tried thinking of ways in which to lessen the burden on moderators, as well as reduce the potential for abuse. I came up with an approval system.

Think of it like Karma, but for individual posts rather than people (Edit: I was incorrectly assuming the Karma system was like a reputation system, not a "days-active" measurement). A post rating system. When you make a post, you receive no minerals for it. After one week, or x amount of time, if your post has +y approval (positive votes), you are awarded the mineral amount you'd normally receive in the current setup. After that time, votes will no longer affect a post either way, though enough negative votes could hide the message and flag it for moderation review.

Why do this? Well, if anyone wants to scam the system, they'd now need several accomplices. Friends are likely to band together and approve all of each other's posts, though, regardless of the posts' true merit. This could be limited by restricting the amount of votes you can give per x amount of time, or you can only vote on x amount of posts of y person per z time.

Example: 5 votes per hour total.
Example: 3 votes per 2 hours on each person's posts. In other words, you can vote on an unlimited amount of posts, but when they're made by the same person you can only rate 3 of their posts per 2 hours.

Another idea is when you make posts, you still earn minerals, but not the kind you can spend. Let's call it Vespene Gas. To vote, it costs gas. This puts a natural limit on voting based upon the voter's own forum contribution.

To help enforce these restrictions, voting can be authorized only for "member-status" posters. As in, people can't just make dummy accounts and vote their threads up. Accounts that can vote must earn the ability, either by, or a combination of, account age, posts, karma, and/or minerals.

Example: To vote, your account must be at least one month old, have 20 posts, +1 karma, and have a positive amount of minerals.

After one week from the post's release, the votes, in terms of earning minerals, are locked in. I allot one week for two reasons. One, it gives plenty of time for the post to accrue votes before being "locked". Any longer and the post is most likely either buried in pages or the thread has dropped out of view. Two, such a long time span acts as a buffer against the instant gratification desired by those who would attempt to cheat the system. Normal posters are more apt to post casually without concern of gain and be happily surprised when minerals roll in down the line.

Why lock in votes? It is to help resolve the threshold. If someone gets enough positive votes and the system awards the person minerals, what happens when another person votes down the post? Does the person subsequently lose those minerals? Such unpredictablility would cause too much grief. A post can still be voted on after the lock-in time, though, and perhaps if it reaches a very high level a sort of "Legendary Post" bonus could be awarded. If the post is voted down to a negative level even after achieving the mineral threshold, a moderator could look into the matter and possibly revoke the minerals originally earned if foulplay is suspected.

So what will be the net result of this system? Well, minerals will be harder to come by, with the richest people ideally being the most positive contributors, rather than just the most active (and possibly spammiest) posters. Moderators will have less to worry about when it comes to making judgement calls on whether someone is using padding techniques in their post, as those people won't earn a grain of blue unless the community approves of their post.

Anywho, just an idea.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 16 2008, 9:17 pm by Hercanic.

But then no one will get minerals because people will either be bitches or eventually get bored of voting for each person on each single post. Also not everyone checks every single forum/post and moderators will have even more work on giving the +y approval.

Minerals will be harder to get compared to the current system, yes, and thus by extention more valuable. Is this not fitting for something that can get you a custom name color and such?


An unsubstantiated fear. You have 37 Karma, do you not? How'd you get it?

You don't have to vote on every post. Just thumbs up on posts you like, thumbs down on the ones you don't. YouTube is a good example of comment voting.


Why does this matter?


Moderators don't give +y approval (though they can vote and would be able to alter the score if needed). When you reach +x score, let's say +3 approval, after one week you get the minerals from that post. So, you might get one negative vote and four positive votes, for a total of +3 approval.

...Excuse me? are you trying to tell something here? If that's so be man enough and tell it to my face and in front of everyone here.


Again, if you want to say something, be a man and say it. I have no fear of anything on the internet, besides getting viruses harmful for my work files.
If you're trying to say something about why I have so many minerals and if I abused the system or anything, I didn't. I happen to be host of a contest currently taking place in this community and I took people's gentle donation. If you check the SMC III topic I should have no minerals by the time I give out prizes, the most minerals I have earned is, well, about 200 or so.
As to the karma = 37. I have absolutely no idea, I didn't even know karma actually worked or it was a coded feature besides getting an icon that I never pay attention to. I thought everyone had 0 but now that I look at other people's profile most have 30 karma and so.
I have no idea how karma works, or how it works or anything at all. so I cannot answer your question: I do not know how I got 37 karma.

That is actually a rather good idea but to earn more minerals not control them. I'd say something like Y! answers where the creator of the topic picks the best answer (votes for it) and you get +2 more minerals and so. That with no other objective than rewarding a poster for it's helpful reply.

It matters because with your proposed system, yes minerals would be something important, but this case was a matter of discussion way before registrations were even enabled, only a few of us (like 20 most) were able to see SeN v5 and log in to it.
Here's the deal, people didn't want minerals to be a huge deal on the site, while others didn't want minerals at all and others wanted minerals so bad. So giving minerals this rarity and importance would only force people to try to abuse the system even more.

I come back to the "why does it matter".
It matters because forums like the modding ones, creative for instance and as another example terrain, they don't get as many circulation as null or the mapping forums do. People that are more active on mapping would be the only ones with minerals making them feel more elitist than possible seeing how minerals can create elitism. People on modding, would have no minerals and no chance to get as many as other people. It would create controversy as many people would want to be the same and threated the same (Communism is a very important part of SeN).


There's a few ideas that could be taken from your proposal and implemented in a different way, like your taken youtube example but modified to another way. Other than that this would be kinda pointless and give minerals an importance they do not deserve.
Anyway, everything of this and anything at all is something that shouldn't really matter to the site. Moose is the only one doing coding right now and he should be coding really important and productive stuff not a really complex mineral system.



Having negative votes would be a good idea, but instead of that it could be used as a report feature of some sort, otherwise you're talking about people directly affecting one's mineral count. There's tons of haters right now, just imagine, Esponeo would absolutely have -1000 minerals by the day a week passes right now seeing the current issues on sen. And you probably would have negatively voted for him, even when you have n/a and have the mineral system disabled.

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Jun 28 2008, 2:53 am by Corbo.

This as well as an increase in multiple accounts for there own benefit.

Paranoid much? I don't see anything out of the ordinary with what Hercanic said. It almost seems as if you are being purposefully manipulative and trollish. I hope you are simply mistaken or paranoid, Corbo. I would to have to take action.

I'm sure that if the current mineral system was not up to par, Moose or IP, or both of them would have come up with a better, more efficient system to install in place of the current one. If people spam, massive edit, or do any other form of posting to gain minerals, illegally, they will be caught.

I hope I am wrong and only paranoid. But if you read his reply he's saying something about how my karma and how did I get it and so on like if he suspected of me for anything at all. Other than that I have nothing to do than wait for his reply and try to understand your post. Maybe you'd like to rephrase the action part cause it wasn't quite clear to a non-native english speaker here.

I believe karma is days active since the karma system was implemented.

Dear Corbo:
Lol, Corbo, short answer: yes, you are paranoid, and no, nothing here is directed at you. The comment on your Karma has to do with the fact that you only earn Karma when someone gives it to you, much like how people voting on threads would give minerals to good posts. This was to counterpoint your argument that no one would get minerals under this idea.

The concern of my idea is the burden of moderation and the transferral of that stress onto the community, not how much anyone has. However, your parania does illustrate that stress transferral. Has anyone given you guff in the past on the amount of minerals you possess? Anyone imply that those minerals have come from less than reputable means?

"There's no way someone could have that much without cheating or spamming." Something along those lines?

If minerals come from public approval, rather than just character count, minerals could act more as a badge of honor, a representation that the posts you make are valuable to the community, and as such are rewarded for your efforts.

Karma does fill that niche to some degree at present, and this idea makes minerals more like Karma, but Karma is less specific than seeing a +15 on a post you spent three hours writing. And unlike minerals, you can't spend Karma.

Personally, I'd prefer a purely Karma-like system to completely avoid the taint that mineral-greed can bring, both real and suspected. As I said, this idea is intended as a compromise. I welcome dialogue on the benefits and detriments of the mineral system, and an exploration in possible solutions.



Dear Brontobyte:
My original post addresses this issue.


_______________________
EDIT

Dear Doodle:
Lol, if this is true then I've completely misinterpreted the Karma system. Other boards have Karma systems like how I've described, so I assumed the same applied here. In that case, it would mean my mineral approvement system does not infringe on Karma's niche. Though that also sweeps the rug out from under my counterpoint to Corbo on whether people would actually vote, but I could point to a number of other websites that feature similar voting mechanisms that receive plenty of activity.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 28 2008, 3:52 am by Hercanic.

In case it isn't clear enough, I'm Carlos Cuchilla, Moose is Moose and "dice" means "says" in spanish.

So basically, karma works and it's whatever is defined in there.

Add: Sorry moose I had to post it after all

You mean if someone had picked it on me?
I'd say yes, there was a topic or so where someone was talking about mineral abusers and put me as example. I probably dreamt that, actually. But yes, people are like "wtf you spammer how did you get so many minerals".
I had to google guff
actually I had farty google it

Interesting. I had made an edit to my above post concerning Doodle's post on Karma while you were typing, just in case you missed it, along with an analysis of the repercussions my misunderstanding has on my prior points.

I actually think the mineral system (sans the idiocy of what you must pay for in basic features) works very well right now.

Now, if we could only go back to v4 Cumulative Posts.. right now post count is just meaningless.

When a moderator rudely demands I stop using "Dear x" at the beginning of some of my posts, and through probing the reason I find is the assumption that I'm padding my messages for minerals and the fear that others might start doing similar things, I don't find the current system works very well.

Well, certain moderators' opinions aside, prefacing your posts with 'Dear' is not going to significantly increase your mineral count. Although, I'll admit it does look rather odd.

I just think any system that requires user participation is starting to get overcomplicated.

No, it's not, but it's the slipperyslope paradigm that was feared. If other people start doing inane things like adding signatures to every post and they get moderated for it, they can point a finger at me and cry bias. I disabled minerals as a result. I use "Dear x" everywhere I go, for pratical, personal, polite and professional reasons--minerals be damned.

The core idea has greater applications. I mentioned one idea where a post negatively voted to -x disapproval could hide it and send out a notice to moderators. You could turn this community into its own limited moderator, potentially discouraging spam and flame wars through social pressure, or at least signaling moderators to flare ups. Isn't the community currently crying out over a lack of good moderation? Give them the tools to self-moderate, at least to a limited extent.

The rest of the idea is a tie-in to minerals to give the system an overall greater impact, and hopefully address possible problems. Afterall, you cannot really judge a person's intentions behind a longwinded tangent in a post, even if you strongly suspect they're after minerals. A few people on my own forum did this, and then suddenly their posts became much shorter. A moderator discovered when quoting one of their posts that they had an exorbitant amount of spaces in the middle of their post, and we found all those shorter posts were utilizing the space exploit. The forum wasn't displaying these spaces, but the people were still getting character credit for them.

A longwinded tangent, however, might not be favorably received by the community, and thus under this idea such a ploy would receive no credit. Truth is, you can never really predict what kind of problems will crop up in the future. This idea at least places an extra wall of protection in what is otherwise a spammer's reward. Are they spamming because they enjoy it, or is it to get minerals? Under the current system, this will always be a nagging question. With my idea, that question is eliminated entirely.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 28 2008, 6:52 am by Hercanic.

Not knowing the situation at all.... that just implies crappy moderating. It sounds like they just wanted to use their power. You adding 'Dear x' to every post isn't hurting anybody and has a very very minute effect on your mineral count. Although I do admit it looks dumb and is annoying.

I don't feel like typing up a long version now, so you get this: Superfluous bureaucracy.

A wise man once said, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

I have yet to see a problem with the current system, I find it works better than a cash system I've seen anywhere else.

Is this gonna be like WarBoards where people put "+rep" after all their posts. I fucking hate that.