Whats Better? Karma, Voting, Badges, Reactions, QnA, Like this?

aery

Context - My community is less of news and chatter but more of how-to and troubleshooting. There are less general discussions but more posts with purpose. Like StackOverflow combined with reddit.

So, I was wondering which plugin will work best for my community?

Karma with Voting: natural choice but have not been implemented before.

Only Voting: Will loose sense in most of the discussions.

Badges + Reactions + Like This : Brilliant Combo but again no sorting facility.

QnA : An answer may consist of many comments combined.

More ever I am looking at Gamification to engage users.

PS: All these plugins are awesome. I am thankful to their authors. The comparison in only for this usage case on what works best with what?

peregrine

sorting for what?

sounds like qna for you in addition to one of the above.- to me.

aery

@peregrine sorting by likes. So that the correct answer or the best comment automatically skims up.

peregrine

oh ok. I really dislike with great great immensity the floating of best answers (threads) within discussions into a different place - 99 times out of a 100 it takes the thread out of context and results in something occasionally worthless - because you can't follow the sequence without following the time on every thread by hovering over permalink.

Instead what I would do is have a button at the top of the discussion - that would take you to the "best answer" or most liked - but leave it in context.

Probably would require "you" some time time to develop that if you liked that idea.

aery

Very true. The discussion lose their meaning if some threads are out of their place.

But when you see stackoverflow or google product forums, this doesn't look like a problem et al.

The idea that you are referring is similar to voting where there are options to sort by top votes/likes so that it skims best answer or sort by date/time.

Unforunately Voting plugin has not been integrated with either KarmaBank or Peregrine's Bagdes.

phreak

@aery: I tried a variety of uses in my forums and found out that Likes + Badges works best for me.

My community is different but i had real problems to attract users to use the QnA. I still think the QnA extensions fails in real use, don't ask me exactly why, it just happened that users did not really pick up on the idea that posts are sorted by vote. So i sorted them in regular order and made it optional to sort by vote. Didn't work either. My users didn't vote anymore. Why should they, sorting was a click away and the needed to be on the first page. I think the QnA plugins in it's current state is not really thought through and well executed. You will need to work a lot on this if you have a active community.

Karma also did it not for me, it seams like it's not fancy enough or too old school to my users. Also they couldn't really follow the pointing process. The current plugins for Karma are good but will need a lot of fancy design to make it attractive to a community.

So Likes + Badges works best for me. I have no community yet on V 2.1 but will have in some months i guess and then would love to add @peregrine Reactions to it. My guess would be that Reactions would be a good add, as it is a advanced "Like" or "Thanks" and with good Reactions defined "Great learning", "Smart workaround", "You wizkid!", etc. could do good in a troubleshooting community.

My 2cents.

UnderDog

How about if you get certain badges from Peregrine's badges plugin that your Karma will improve?

I Agree with the 'best answer' thing. It should have something of a different CSS style (and a button) instead of moved to the top of the comments list.

vrijvlinder

@UnderDog said:
I Agree with the 'best answer' thing. It should have something of a different CSS style (and a button) instead of moved to the top of the comments list.

Brilliant ! like the style on the quotes but the whole comment has a background to mark it best answer.

You are very life like and clever for a plugin ♥

what other things can you do ?

aery

If I am not mistaking, Likes does not allow to sort comments?

Its a huge dilemma for me.

Either I can have QnA or Voting which will be perfect if I want to make How-to troubleshooting community sort of same lines of stackoverflow. But then there will be no conversations, no discussions. People wil come, find answers and leave.

Or I can have Badges+Reactions where the best answer will be recognized by the community but it will not skim up and one has to find it. But this will also preserve conversations.

Senior experienced members, please help in deciding optimal strategy.

peregrine

But when you see stackoverflow or google product forums, this doesn't look like a problem et al.

Yes but comments are tied to answers on stack overflow not with comments and replies interpersed through every answer. Two different animals.

I also like the reply to plugin format - the first plugin I ever tried.

aery

@UnderDog Karma and Peregrine's Bages are not integrated. or are they?

@peregrine said:
Yes but comments are tied to answers on stack overflow not interpersed through every answer.

You have seen my community, isn't half the discussions are quite like stackoverflow?

peregrine

I don't see many communities - most take too long to load especially if they are image intense and i give up because I have a slow connection . If they've got banner that move around lots of graphics, I give up. And they tell me personal info - like you are from this country,etc. I know they have ip, etc and track things, but i don't want it gratuitously displayed before my eyes - so if i view a forum with these (unappetizing features) - I never go back. I can't recall your forum.

vrijvlinder

You could just disable js and block all images to a specific site

http://noscript.net

peregrine

@vrijvlinder said:
You could just disable js and block all images to a specific site

http://noscript.net

I could, but its easier not to click again...

peregrine

V,

but if I need to i just use lynx

lynx vanillaforums.org

not sure if you are familiar with lynx. it was the cat's meow once.

peregrine

voila

aery

Each option has its own problem. I dont want to check what works best by adapting different startegies.

Rather a single strategy for long term that my members will get used to.

x00

Karma with Voting: natural choice but have not been implemented before.

I don't know what you are talking about. But I did something specific to a client, where people voted on discussions, and each vote cost karma. These votes are called 'Support' and the plugin called 'Requests'. In other words the user either supports the request or not. Those discussions are sorted by the Support it gets.

However in that case it was selected categories, so what would happen is people would support a request discussion or not, when it reached a certain number of votes it would be 'Approved', there would be a filter tab for 'Approved' requests, and another for 'Filled', which is where it could be moved once the request is filled.

There are permissions for adding requests and marking them as filled.

x00

Btw the simplest way to add or subtract karma programmatically is:

$KarmaBank = new KarmaBankModel($UserID);

$Reward = -1;
$Reason = "Some Unique Reason";
if(!$KarmaBank->CheckForCollissions($Reason,$Reward)){
    $KarmaBank->Transaction($Reason,$Reward);
}

As you can see in that example, the reward is negative. make the reason specific, in other words if it is specific to a discussion reference the discussion id, etc. Just don't make it too long.

x00

You can use

$Balance = $KarmaBank->GetBalance()->Balance;

To check the balance, such as to prevent a transaction through lack of funds.

aery

@x00 thanks a lot.

What I was thinking is something like StackOverflow where votes determine good comments and votes add up to user karma.

This way, user is prompted to gain more karma by useful comments that will fetch him more votes.