could askbot use percentage-based values for karma (and other) thresholds?

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asked Oct 18 '10

niles
463 ● 3 ● 15

I've been thinking again about the karma thresholds for user permissions, and the numerical values attached to badges . . . I know these are configurable, but I wonder if it would be useful for the defaults to be percentages of the total site activity, rather than specific values. Then new communities using askbot wouldn't have to re-set the thresholds as they grow (if they even bother to lower them in the first place). Of course there would have to be some absolute minimum values, for when the site is brand new, but I think these should be small.

Here's one proposal: Let U be the top 50% of users (that is, the set of their karma values). Then set the following thresholds to gain the following priveleges:

open and close own questions: 100 or minimum of U
retag other's questions: 200 or top 20% of U
edit community wiki questions: 200 or top 10% of U
edit any answer: 400 or top 5% of U
delete any comment: 1000 or top 2% of U

Since a user may fall outside of a given percentage (as the community grows), there should be some (lower) threshold to lose each privelege. It could be zero, if you think that people should never lose a privelege once they've gained it, but the minimum value of U would probably be a more reasonable threshold. Also, U could be recalculated monthly rather than, say, daily or hourly, to make the numbers fluctuate less. Or, if you want to take this idea to an extreme, U could be recalculated every t days, where t is 10% of the site lifetime.

A similar principle could be applied to the badges: getting the "nice question" badge could require having your answer upvoted by 10% of the total number of users.

As a last remark, I think that the particular thresholds should still be configurable; the new feature here is being able to set them by percentage, rather than by absolute number only, and then setting the defaults that way (better for new askbot communities). (And, by the way, I haven't actually looked at a single line of askbot code, so forgive me and let me know if this is already possible. :)

Answer 1

answered Oct 18 '10

ccanonc
313 ● 3 ● 10

In addition to my comments above, I think another useful metric of positive activity is a moving average of the first derivative of karma with respect to time, and possibly other variables with respect to time (Recent Karma Velocity!). A moving average, however weighted, has some advantages (as long as you have that sliding window of time, it keeps people incentivized to keep contributing.) Perhaps a first step towards this would be to show the moving average of the first derivative (with site configurable time interval of course) in the karma history. Then perhaps draw up some proposals based upon observed behavior.

Right now I'm wondering how page views are counted. Questions with high view counts have a corresponding proportionality of popularity, however, it is often the answers that draw the views(!). =) ccanonc (Oct 18 '10)
The views are counted in a "humanized" way. If you've seen the page as it is your consequent views are not counted. If I modify the page and you look at it again, that view will be counted. Also robot visits are not counted as far as it is possible. Evgeny (Oct 18 '10)
Yes, anonymous users are counted per-session. Evgeny (Oct 18 '10)
So, if someone cleared their cookies, they could drive up views? wget could be directed to do this infinitely. ccanonc (Oct 18 '10)

Answer 2

answered Oct 18 '10

Evgeny

6665 ● 31 ● 49 ● 95
http://askbot.org/

updated Oct 18 '10

This can be experimented with, the easiest approach will be to re-assess the barriers automatically about once a day. It's a lot easier than hard-coding the logic into a whole bunch of tests and assertions of type assert_user_can_do_X.

If anyone is interested to make this work - one can write a management command that analyzes the karma of users and adjusts the settings accordingly.

Management commands are located in directory askbot/management/commands.

Available minimum rep settings are in askbot/conf/minimum_reputation.py.

Say if you want to update setting MIN_REP_TO_VOTE_UP you could code like:

#import askbot live settings
from askbot.conf import settings

settings.update('MIN_REP_TO_VOTE_UP', some_new_value)

The management command is then run via cron job:

python manage.py reassess_karma_barriers

It's best to try and see how this will work. It's not obvious how people will react to having some privileges come and go based on their "karma" standing relative to others.

I'm sure over time, incrementally you will find a close to optimal solution. ccanonc (Oct 18 '10)

could askbot use percentage-based values for karma (and other) thresholds?

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