Posted by drumdance on November 15, 2006 at 1:13am
Can anyone point me to some good examples of userpoints? We've enabled theom our sites, but so far we're not doing anything besides tracking the total in the user profile. We're interested in using them as a way to reward users for participation (i.e. giving them different ranks for reaching certain point levels) and/or as an alternative currency to purcahse t-shirts and other schwag. But we're nervous about the potential to incent quanity over quality. Any suggestions?
FYI our sites are:
http://www.yourclimbing.com
http://www.yourmtb.com
http://www.yourclimbing.com
TIA,
Derek
Comments
Ad Space.
We've decided to sell ad space with user points. I have not currently implemented it but basically I am going to use CCK and actions to make a form users can fill out and submit a small 100x100 image that will be shown on the sidebar. We are starting with a 100 points will get you a banner on the site for a month. This could be blog, news, whatever type of site you want to promote pretty much. If you do it then 100 points will be removed from your account. We have also setup points in a variety of ways. 1 point for voting, 2 points for commenting, 20 points for getting a user referral. If our site grows then we can scale the points needed for a banner ad higher.
You can check out the site at:
http://fingazandteeth.com
!warning: It's an adult humor comic, very simliar to southpark.
http://xamox.NET
Good idea
I like the points-for-ads idea a lot. Have you implemented this yet?
Real Live Userpoints Example
Hey drumdance,
We do some really fun things with Userpoints at http://juice.altiris.com
We teach users ways to earn points here: http://juice.altiris.com/points
Once they've earned enough points, they can cash them in for prizes.
Can you say Chucky Cheese?
HTH,
Kevin
Cool!
Have you had any problems with people spamming the system? Your community seems pretty professional, so maybe not an issue. I like the idea of calling them Juice Points.
I also like using them as an incentive to link to them. How do you track clicks? Is that a custom module? One thing I would fear would be some spammer using a bot to generate bogus clicks.
So far we've monitored the earnings closely
We haven't had many problems with spamming/cheating.
Since we give one point each time a user votes on an article, we did have a problem with users voting blindly (one user earned 400 points in less than an hour and then wanted to cash them in). So I wrote some code that would limit votes to 10 a day.
The "affiliate" module (the one that rewards users for posting an button on their site to promote our product) was loosely based on the affiliate stuff at getfirefox. We had 2bits.com write it for us. Initially, we had a problem with that one too. We had a few users leveraging sites that do nothing but expose your page/button/banner to get views. We were able to stop that by adding the "noframes" module (these sites depend on frames to round up clicks).
Other than that, it's gone pretty smooth. If a user submits gibberish instead of an article, we catch it before it goes to far and certainly before they try to cash in their points.
We are having Khalid (at 2bits) write an enhancement so users are not actually awarded points until we release them from some sort of a moderation queue. That'll be nice. It's hard to take points away from people after they've been awarded.
I'm also in the process of setting up a more professional site where they can cash in their points. Check out http://dev3.webwiseone.com
HTH,
Kevin