Curious about Rewards & Rankings

Darmawan

In addition to leaderboards, how about something like user trust level in Discourse?
https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924

Doesn't have to be exactly like that.. but I think it's cool to have built-in spam prevention because not all spammers can be caught with StopForumSpam and captchas.

purldator

I highly push for something akin to Discourse's trust levels. It's based on actual online community research. Trust levels was the single "selling" point for me with them.

I don't know what the flarum's likes feature will eventually hook into but that is one hook already in place to be a metric for any kind of trust system.

Badges and rewards for the sake of having them serves no real purpose that I have seen in my own research. Gamification for the sake of having it leads to unintended competition to lift those counts even if they have no real "worth" in the system.

Also, exp-points relates to the "numbers obsession" in my link above. This is why I didn't consider NodeBB as an option because they rely on that and inclusion of downvoting. That's a whole 'nother problem.

Dominion

I haven't looked very deeply into the system used by Discourse, but I agree that gamification for its own sake isn't very appealing. The idea of adding a competitive element to incentivize participation seems to me to be at odds with the idea of a forum as a place for communication and sharing of information, which are essentially cooperative activities. In many cases the expectation is that the gamification system should be used in a spirit of irony, at which point it's just adding noise to the system.

I've got plans for eventually opening semi-public forum where some sort of reasonable reward/ranking system might be useful. But my current esoTalk forum is an in-house system for discussion of work-related projects. In that sort of forum, gamification would only get in the way. So whatever you end up going with, I hope it will be handled as an optional extension.

Incidentally, is there a list somewhere of features and functions that will definitely be included in the release version of Flarum?

Franz

Dominion Incidentally, is there a list somewhere of features and functions that will definitely be included in the release version of Flarum?

The roadmap may give you a rough idea...

Dominion

Thanks, Franz! That does help.

travpittman

Toby Does Laracasts use Flarum for their forums? Have they just customised it?

luceos

travpittman No, Laracasts uses a forum developed by Jeffrey Way himself. He has voiced several times on request that he was thinking to open source it as a package. But from my understanding, seeing the immense delay in doing so, I guess the code is far too integrated into the Laracasts code to do this easily. So don't have high hopes Jeffrey gets to releasing anything decoupled open source soon.

travpittman

luceos Thanks for the fast reply! 🙂

travpittman

Hi Luceos, I really want to use your script for our site, but I see you say don't use on "Production" yet... how long before you think we could be using it on Production? If we can't use it soon, we'll have to go with another script instead which doesn't look/work as good as I've seen from Flarum 🙁 do you have anyone who's applied it to a live site yet?

luceos

travpittman first off (disclaimer) I'm not a core dev of Flarum, @Toby and @Franz are.

As to your question, I understand you have to make decisions; so does the core team. They follow a great practice by not publishing any official release date, because they want to release a qualitative product.

"It's done when it's done"

There are plenty of people who are using flarum in production environments already. They take the risks upon themselves.

Also please do not hijack other threads for asking these off-topic questions. If you have a specific off-topic question, open up a thread for yourself, or use the search to find related questions.

luceos

Seeing the number of off topic comments, I'm closing this one.