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Building a killer forum reputation system

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Joe is breaking apart his vision for Q&A forum reputation system into three phases. At Microsoft the common terminology for this is "crawl, walk, run".  The current MSDN forum reputation system, as it exists today, is probably in the "yet to be born" stage. 

Joe has outlined a plan to take it from simple post counts to something that sets our system apart.  Its my hope that we'll get some of this stuff implemented so that we don't have to answer questions about forum reputation with "dodge, duck, dip, dive, and... dodge".

Phase 1

Most of the first phase of the forums reputation system is focused around "incenting and rewarding top answerers"--encouraging those key members of our forum community to contribute as much as possible. Without further ado.... ( read on )

Phase 2

Phase 2 of the reputation system aims at helping another group of key users of the forums--the question-askers... ( read on )

Of course I've read the spec and talk to Joe daily, so I know where this is going, but you'll have to subscribe to his blog if you'd like to find out.  It's been a pleasure working with him so far and I'm sure it will be good.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2006
    Now tell me that you wrote this post on Thursday night after I told you I was leaving for a dodgeball game...
  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2006
    I did write it Thursday night.
  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2006
    I began to think do the suggested "building blocks" have anything in common.

    What if instead you had only the wiki functionality, you could then take the approach of "everythingsawiki" but with some extra properties make these wiki blocks act like as they were, say, messages in a forum, only editable by owner of the message. The wiki block would keep version history of a message and a bunch of those would then form a thread of messages etc.

    There would have to be service for taking in audio/video also, such that a timeline based presentation "webcast" could be done by arranging wiki and video blocks in the timeline and then using the chat/audio stream service to tie in commentary to the presentation.

    With such platform building complex and highly interactive sites would be much less of a challenge as all the architecture and backend work would have been done by people who know performance and security.
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2006
    Hello Joku

    The Communities platform team (within Microsoft.COM) is working towards something like what you described; I would like to have a conversation with you (or anyone else interested in the topic) about it. If you want to contact me my e-mail address is filibers at the domain microsoft.com.

    Thanks!