Forum-idea: StarCount

[Robert]

You guys are really a bunch of conservatives btw :P
A new idea, let's shoot it down as soon as possible

[Locutus]

Originally posted by CyberShy
I'm very curious how you would hack that, can you pm it to me?

Not that I necessarily don't trust you, but just how stupid do you think I am?

It's easier to spam my way to Deity, I just reply with a small tekst to every post in the on topic forums and nobody may even notice.

It's even easier to join a few PBEM games. Only takes a few minutes of your day, you get to post a lot of 1-word posts and it's perfectly legit, there is absolutely no risk of getting PCRed or anything! Or did you think people like Paddy and Grandpa Troll got to be double/triple/quadruple/whatever Deities by posting lengthy philosophical debates or strategy theses? (Of course that's not to say they only post 1-word posts and don't contribute anything else to this site, but PBEM tracking makes up a good portion of their PC.)

Post count is such a meaningless thing that's so incredibly easy to increase by perfectly legitimate means that abuse of this system really isn't an issue. Any system can be abused, your system, post counts, anything else you could come up with. There is no point in investing a whole lot of effort in something that gives you little or no benefit. When we see someone spamming, we punish them. That system functions just fine as it is and has done so for years, I don't see these forums being flooded with spam so badly that we need to do something -- anything! -- against it.

Above all, spam is in the eye of the beholder and on this site the moderators are the beholders.

[LordShiva]

Making meaningful one-line replies is truly an art, and should not be punished.

[Robert]

That's what I said, Locotus, every system can be abused. The question is: is it too easy to abuse it.
Then I think that PC system is easy to abuse but we love it nevertheless.
Postcount is important for a forum because it's members for some strange reason love it and therefor contribute more. That keeps a forum alife. And it binds it's members to it. Why would someone move to another forum if he has a veteran status at the old one while he'll be a newbie at the new forum.

Therefor is postcount, how silly it may be, very important for an online-forum.
That it's possible to abuse the system doesn't matter since it's not easy to abuse.

I do not dare to say that the StarCount system can't be abused, it can, like the postcount system can be abused.

I just wonder why you are against a StarCount system and back it up with arguments that can be used against the PostCount system as well.
And like I said, 'my' system hasn't been invented to fight spam. It has been invented to promote quality posts. And it's of course impossible to tell which post is quality only by a computer formula. I just think that it does a very good job by simple means though.

Lastly: why do you not want to give me that hack-proposal? I am a forum-builder myself and I'm very interested in that kind of information. I wonder if I'll be able to neutralise the hack. Does it have something to do with local copies? My forum has already been protected against that for ages. Since that's the only thing I can come up with I am really curious.

[Robert]

Originally posted by LordShiva
Making meaningful one-line replies is truly an art, and should not be punished.

You think from an off-topic point of view where discussion and debate is the core of the posts.

I think from an on-topic point of view.
A one-liner can be very helpfull in the on-topics forum, that's true. But the real value for the site are the mods, the university-posts, the tactical tips, the stories, the list-posts, etc. etc. etc.

And those posts are long, most of the time.
And once again, it doesn't harm to have 1 star.
Like it doesn't harm to have a Prince title based on your postcount.

It just says: "This user posts one liners most of the time" then you peek at his postcount and see that he's apparantly a spammer. 10593 posts with an avg of 13 chars/pst
It's the combination.

BTW: I'm really really suprised that the PBEM forums do count towards your postcount!!!
I do not even have to start a game to spam myself into triple deity. I only have to start a thread with 2 friends and together we have to spam it full. Amazing.

[Solver]

Yes it is too easy to abuse it. It might be something that works for your forum, but not here. Other than the fact that it could be pretty easily technically hacked in many ways (what Locutus shows is one of the many possibilities), it would also get abused by people simply making their posts longer than necessary, without adding actual content. Which would only be worse than regular spam because a 10-character spam post takes no more than a second to ignore.

I'm all for promotion of quality posts. But post counts, star systems or anything remotely similar (basically, a regular forum feature) will not achieve that. Quality posts are encouraged by other means. As for this system specifically, indeed, post quality is not related to its length. Yes, there are types of posts that are long and useful (strategy guides, for example). Still, there are also very short posts that are useful - say, someone asks what part of their computer to upgrade to run Civ4. It can be answered sufficiently in one or two sentences, is a very useful post, yet short.

[Solver]

Crosspost, so here goes more.

I think from an on-topic point of view.
A one-liner can be very helpfull in the on-topics forum, that's true. But the real value for the site are the mods, the university-posts, the tactical tips, the stories, the list-posts, etc. etc. etc.

Yes, but: brief tactical tips can be short posts. Answers to technical problems, too. And answers to some specific gameplay questions. Basically, when a new player comes aboard and asks a specific question, the answer is usually shot, not a one-liner perhaps, but short.

And once again, it doesn't harm to have 1 star.
Like it doesn't harm to have a Prince title based on your postcount.

It just says: "This user posts one liners most of the time" then you peek at his postcount and see that he's apparantly a spammer. 10593 posts with an avg of 13 chars/pst
It's the combination.

What is the point of such a combined system - judging people? Making guesses as to whether their posts are worth reading? I can think of many relatively new users who make insightful posts - yes, the star-system would reflect that their posts aren't all that short. But I'd find it to be useless, reading a few posts by a user is often enough. You can quickly see if a user is insightful and makes quality posts, and can quickly see if he is a spammer. I do not want to say any names, but not all spammers are people with Deity-level post counts.

BTW: I'm really really suprised that the PBEM forums do count towards your postcount!!!
I do not even have to start a game to spam myself into triple deity. I only have to start a thread with 2 friends and together we have to spam it full. Amazing.

You'd be surprised. PBEM posts serve a purpose. And as far as I am aware, the people there, while getting large post counts, do not generally care about that fact. And PBEM is about the Civ community which is, after all, what this site itself is about.

[Robert]

1. What Locotus says is not true, it's not easy to abuse and certainly not easier to abuse then postcount.

2. That's why I keep repeating: we're talking about an average, we're not sticking a "quality" or "junk" label on every individual post.

[Robert]

1. Such a star system is not about how many short posts somebody makes, it's about how many long posts does somebody make. If somebody posts one liners for 90% of the time he'll never get past 0 or 1 stars. If someone is in debates about the site and actually contributing (like ie. in this thread) his/her starcount will rise. So there's no problem with giving a one-liner.

2. I do not deny the importance of an PBEM forum, I just wonder if the postcount system should be applicated on it, even more since you mention that the posters themselves do not care about it. But that's a total off topic discussion, but since I'm a moderator of that forum, it is hard to keep an eye on it, fortunately it's not being spammed yet by postcountgrabbers. Maybe a matter of time?

[Solver]

No, Locutus is right. There are ways to hack it - and you'd be spending an inadequate amount of time plugging them all.

I just absolutely fail to see the point of having these averages, to be honest. Seems to me like it could be Another Useless Feature (TM) - that's at best. At worst, and this probably would be the case, you'd have two groups - people who don't give a damn, and people who try to abuse the system. Which sucks.

Mind you, I think postcounts are just a sometimes interesting statistic, nothing more. It seems that the only people who care are spammers and a few guys who are bitter that OTF posts don't count. I'm pretty certain that posts counts could be abolished in all Civ4 forums, for instance, and you'd have a very small minority even caring about it.

[Robert]

I'm really curious on how to hack this system.
The examples given by Locotus won't do the trick.
Perhaps php is easier to hack then my software (Lotus Domino) and I'm not aware of those gaps. But as far as I can see it's not easy to hack it, if not impossible at all.

If you know ways to hack it, I'm really interested from a professional point of view.

[Locutus]

If something is easy to abuse, it's also easy to fight the abuse. If something is hard to abuse it's disproportionally harder to detect and fight that abuse. We don't want to be fighting this battle when we can be doing a gazillion other things that have a much bigger effect on making this site better.

I've yet to see any evidence that our current system is being abused in ways that we are not able to deal with (and just because we don't tend to reprimand spammers or other rule breakers in public doesn't mean we don't take action...) You are offering a solution to a problem that simply doesn't exist.

[Ming]

I still question the initial concept that length of post = quality

[Solver]

Okay, it seems like the mods are very united on this one

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Ming
I still question the initial concept that length of post = quality

Yup. I always thought it was who = quality, "who" being a mod, admin or someone they like.