Userpoints/karma/slashdot style reviews
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chx - Fri, 2008-04-25 20:35
Today two concepts were raised on IRC: Slashdot style reviews -- but also, Amazon.com also have a "was this review helpful to you" feature. Also we could have "karma" (userpoints) that you can earn by handbook pages, comments here and there, patches, commits... you can spend it on badges and reviews. Very quickly it'd become quite visible who has Level 32 in Module Maintainership :D
Ical feed
Userpoints
I like the userpoints idea the best. It adds gaming to Drupal.org -- I know I'd spend more time there! I guess that means we'll have Drupal "wizards" that can do userpoint grants, too :P
I like the userpoints idea,
I like the userpoints idea, it'd immediately cut down the issue of one person adding dozens of useless ratings to modules (well, unless someone who contributes a lot decided to do that). I don't see an easy way to grant userpoints though - helping out in the support forums, answering (and providing well written) bug reports in issue queues, helping in #drupal-support - how does this get userpointified?
In addition to
In addition to userpoints/review of modules why not have a Gold, Silver, Bronze status that is earned. These criteria would be predetermined by the drupal admins and would reflect the maturity of the module.
For example, the Gold modules would
1. Be a module that has existed for more than 1 year.
2. Not be a duplicate of any other module
3. Have active developers
4. Relatively active in the issue queue
5. Other modules depend on this module.
etc.
To ease the load on the drupal website admins, most of the stuff should be easy to track and maybe automate some of it.
Anyway. A predetermined set of criteria to give the user another dynamic to evaluate the module.
3 and 4 are discussed here:
3 and 4 are discussed here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10629 (and I like that idea).
I also like 5 and 2. However 1., I think older modules will get higher ratings anyway.
I guess I envisioned this as
I guess I envisioned this as being complementary to user ratings, not in replacement of user ratings. It's a more objective approach to modules. It's kind of like having a comparison chart as well as user reviews when buying a product.
Could be fun to show off your stats, but...
Adding experience points could upset the relatively level playing field that Drupal.org offers. At the moment, all users are basically equal, not even post count is displayed. If we start ranking users, it must be done in a way that doesn't discourage or belittle those who are new to Drupal. If it leads to something like "I'm better than you because I'm level 32. You're only level 1, so your opinion doesn't really matter", it's probably the wrong way to go.
I'm also wary of Drupal turning into a popularity contest where users compete for cliques of friends who give each other +1s at any available opportunity (or vote down those who they don't like, just to spite them). I think Digg.com is a good example of how this promotes a "lowest common denominator rises to the top" problem.
Designing a fair and useful point system for this would be difficult. Like Catch said, a lot of the effort put in by maintainers and volunteers is not readily visible or able to be voted on. Some things could not be tracked at all (helping on IRC, for example).
As far as "Gold modules", I think Acquia is probably going to set the standards here. They appear to be selecting a group of high quality contrib modules for their carbon project, and those will most likely get some kind of elevated status.
Slashcomments module
I just released a module to implement Slashdot-style comment moderation and viewing.
You may check it out here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12439
Delf.