Wouldn't it be nice if ...

[Former Member]

Wouldn't it be nice if we could award points for helpful answers even if we aren't the author?

I have found the SDN Forums invaluable as we struggle to get up to speed with Netweaver.

The point system is a great way to reward good answers and I am religious about using it. However, there are many cases where I found the answer to my problem in a post I did NOT create.

I would really, really like to be able to reward the person(s) who provided the answer but I can't.

Would it be hard to implement something like that?

Thanks

David.

[Former Member]

It's a nice thought and we have tossed around the idea of "moderation" a bit.

Our thought was giving each person a set of points they could use to reward others in the forums or weblogs or weblog comments once the points are used up they have to wait until the next month (?) to get more points.

It's something we talked about but never sat down to do the math so to speak to see if it's feasible or not. What does everyone else think?

[Former Member]

I think this is on the right track but what we really want to do is reward is the answer that has been expanded on beyond the minimum response required, e.g.

If someone posts a question and the answer is a simple -

<i>Try Tran XXXX</i>

While that might be useful and correct response, I don't know that it deserves points over and above what the person who posted the question awarded.

Now if the response was more like -

<i>Try Tran XXXX. It will identify the query using high CPU. From there you can obtain an Explain Plan which will identify how the query is being executed. Review this with your DBA to determine if table statistics are out of date or if an additional index should be created.</i>

It seems that a post that not only answers the question for the poster, but can serve as an educational resource for the community is what warrants more recognition.

Maybe, rather than allowing readers to simply award points to the response, there could be someway for readers of the post to indicate that they found it very informative and useful, and that the thread could somehow be flagged as having continuing educational value. These selected threads could then be listed in a Top 100, or maybe you have a Top 10 for each month, and then the Top 10 could be awarded points at the end of the month somehow. Then a post from SDN could notify all users of the forum that the Top 10 for that month had been determined so that community members could see the best threads of the month. Then maintain a link in each forum that would take you to the Top 10 for any month (like the Top OSS Notes does).

The goal should be to find a mechanism that allows the community to identify threads that the community values (points, voting, etc) so that SDN can do something to make those threads standout and easy to find.

Pizzaman

[Former Member]

I totally agree.