Forum Monthly Award

[electrolyte]

Hey! We want to start a monthly award here to honor members who are awesome and contribute to building our community. However, we need and want your input on how to set this up so that it's fun, fair, and enjoyable for everyone.

A few concerns: In thinking about fairness, we considered the maybe the award should be given to the person who posts the most HITs. However, this could lead to people repeatedly sharing the same HIT or sharing not-so-good HITs in an attempt to drive up their numbers. We thought about having a voting system where people can nominate others and then vote. But this may lead to more popular member winning and deserving but less popular members being overlooked. We also want to be able to recognize members who may not share HITs but instead answer questions or otherwise contribute to the overall community.

That's why we're asking you! Do you have any ideas about what kind of monthly award system you'd like to see? What do you think would work well to help recognize great members? Thanks!

 

[essjay]

Since y'all are super active, anyway, why don't we let the admin come up with a shortlist of people they think should be recognized for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence and then let the rest of the members vote?

 

[MerryLou]

^then maybe old winners can also nominate new ones and over time the admins drop out? (Maybe you can only win once a year?)

 

[El Pablo]

I hope the title is going to be Crowd Pleaser

 

[TQueen]

Maybe like a Member of the Month? The person would maybe be nominated by admin/mod for doing something like posting great hits or writing awesome scripts, and the people could vote? The title could float around instead of being permanent.

 

[Twirdman]

A few concerns: In thinking about fairness, we considered the maybe the award should be given to the person who posts the most HITs. However, this could lead to people repeatedly sharing the same HIT or sharing not-so-good HITs in an attempt to drive up their numbers. We thought about having a voting system where people can nominate others and then vote. But this may lead to more popular member winning and deserving but less popular members being overlooked. We also want to be able to recognize members who may not share HITs but instead answer questions or otherwise contribute to the overall community.

That's why we're asking you! Do you have any ideas about what kind of monthly award system you'd like to see? What do you think would work well to help recognize great members? Thanks!

One theoretical way you could prevent people from simply sharing the same hit is to try and set up a system so that only the first instance of a hit is counted. So anyone who subsequently shares doesn't get credit for it and also a person is prevented from posting the same hit over and over again. The second problem is a bit harder to solve. You could have it where people who do the hit report an hourly and anyone who has an average hourly below some threshold is out of the running. That still leaves the problem of it completely overlooks the people who are helping in non hit sharing ways.

I think the best option would be to go one of 2 routes. Have the moderators directly pick a list of people to vote for and let everyone else vote on them. The other option might be have people nominate a list of contestants for consideration by the mods and have the mods choose the winner. You could also combine those 2 into a multi part thing so say have the forum nominate a list of people, have the moderators pare down that list, and then have a vote from the forum at large.

I would also agree with only allowing people to win a certain number of times per year.

 

[Lepi]

One theoretical way you could prevent people from simply sharing the same hit is to try and set up a system so that only the first instance of a hit is counted. So anyone who subsequently shares doesn't get credit for it and also a person is prevented from posting the same hit over and over again. The second problem is a bit harder to solve. You could have it where people who do the hit report an hourly and anyone who has an average hourly below some threshold is out of the running.

The hourly rate thing just seems like a good way to make people post fewer HITs. It's also really subjective and doesn't take in to consideration things like surveys with 2 versions, or batch HITs that require cherry picking, or even things like Virals, where the hourly rate fluctuates based on the length of the video.

I think the best potential method would be to add a "Supremely Good HIT" button (or whatever superlative that communicates the message).

People post HITs. When someone posts a really good HIT, members hit the "Supremely Good HIT" button. At the end of the month, the person with the most "Supremely Good HIT" clicks would be the HIT Provider Of The Month.

Only potential issue I see is that the number would have to reset each month.

 

[clickhappier]

The hourly rate thing just seems like a good way to make people post fewer HITs. It's also really subjective and doesn't take in to consideration things like surveys with 2 versions, or batch HITs that require cherry picking, or even things like Virals, where the hourly rate fluctuates based on the length of the video.

I think the best potential method would be to add a "Supremely Good HIT" button (or whatever superlative that communicates the message).

People post HITs. When someone posts a really good HIT, members hit the "Supremely Good HIT" button. At the end of the month, the person with the most "Supremely Good HIT" clicks would be the HIT Provider Of The Month.

Only potential issue I see is that the number would have to reset each month.

@Kadauchi made a thingy to add up a basic total (more reflective of surveys, I assume) of all the HIT dollar values posted on MTC each day, he'd probably be able to make a thingy to add up the number of times someone received that kind of rating each day, if he wanted to and there were a need...

But there's just no way to do a perfectly-fair way to determine this kind of thing numerically though, because this would depend on people coming back after seeing how good the HIT turned out to be, and clicking that button vs one of the other rating buttons, and doing so on the first person who posted that HIT (there were a few occasions where I was the first to post a damn good HIT on MTG, and either nobody or one person 'awesomed' it, then later someone else reposted it and got a bunch of 'awesomes', so I know these things happen...).

 

[Lepi]

It's true. This will never be 100 percent objective. Even if people don't forget, there's always the chance that someone will with hold their Awesome HIT vote because of pettiness.

 

[Twirdman]

@Kadauchi

But there's just no way to do a perfectly-fair way to determine this kind of thing numerically though, because this would depend on people coming back after seeing how good the HIT turned out to be, and clicking that button vs one of the other rating buttons, and doing so on the first person who posted that HIT (there were a few occasions where I was the first to post a damn good HIT on MTG, and either nobody or one person 'awesomed' it, then later someone else reposted it and got a bunch of 'awesomes', so I know these things happen...).

That might be one area where you could implement the whole only first person gets the credit. Not sure how feasible it would be to track all the hits posted, but if you could just assign each hit to the person who first posted it and any subsequent awesoming of that hit is credited to the first poster.

 

[clickhappier]

That might be one area where you could implement the whole only first person gets the credit. Not sure how feasible it would be to track all the hits posted, but if you could just assign each hit to the person who first posted it and any subsequent awesoming of that hit is credited to the first poster.

I guess that would all come down to how clever kadauchi's programming can get, heh.

 

[Lepi]

That might be one area where you could implement the whole only first person gets the credit. Not sure how feasible it would be to track all the hits posted, but if you could just assign each hit to the person who first posted it and any subsequent awesoming of that hit is credited to the first poster.

My concern would be in that some HITs show up multiple times throughout the day, or a batch reloads under the same ID.

Someone posts an awesome HIT at 2 in the morning. They get Awesome'd.

The same HIT shows up at 11:00 and someone else posts it, but the first person gets Awesome'd again?

 

[Kadauchi]

I guess that would all come down to how clever kadauchi's programming can get, heh.

That might be one area where you could implement the whole only first person gets the credit. Not sure how feasible it would be to track all the hits posted, but if you could just assign each hit to the person who first posted it and any subsequent awesoming of that hit is credited to the first poster.

I can do that. I also can weight hits based on their TO, so someone posting a 1.00 average HITs would be worth less than a 3.50 average. I have most of this code already written for other things I do, so its all pretty easy for me to add into the forum info script.

My concern would be in that some HITs show up multiple times throughout the day, or a batch reloads under the same ID.

Someone posts an awesome HIT at 2 in the morning. They get Awesome'd.

The same HIT shows up at 11:00 and someone else posts it, but the first person gets Awesome'd again?

Since all posts have times, a delay could be set in and the awesome could get reset after 6hrs or whatever is deemed enough time which can solve that.

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The issue with a lot of the suggestions is that they end up leaning towards HITs, which is why (I assume) that MTG had two separate monthly awards. This affects people like myself and @clickhappier a lot since we rarely post any HITs, but do all sorts of stuff in the background for the forum, (nothing out side the daily hit thread exists), and contribute with scripts or otherwise. I do like the idea of a single award though. Maybe you can use empirical HIT data for more of an acknowledgement or something.

 

[aveline]

Since y'all are super active, anyway, why don't we let the admin come up with a shortlist of people they think should be recognized for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence and then let the rest of the members vote?

Have the moderators directly pick a list of people to vote for and let everyone else vote on them. The other option might be have people nominate a list of contestants for consideration by the mods and have the mods choose the winner.

The problem with this is favoritism. We were accused of this several times on MTG because we were often taking part in the nominations. We weren't really picking favorites, but we were just trying to nominate people that we thought were helpful and were being overlooked. Yet the accusations were still there, and it was even implied that we were influencing the voting somehow by nominating certain members. If we're going to have a community award, I would rather have that award come from the community, without the need for staff involvement (I'm not saying the staff can't be involved. I just don't want the staff to have any more influence over who wins than anyone else does.)

I think the best potential method would be to add a "Supremely Good HIT" button (or whatever superlative that communicates the message).

People post HITs. When someone posts a really good HIT, members hit the "Supremely Good HIT" button. At the end of the month, the person with the most "Supremely Good HIT" clicks would be the HIT Provider Of The Month.

The problem with using a button like that for eligibility or even to determine a winner, as was pretty evident on MTG, is that it is suuuuch a headache to make sure that the button is being used properly. People would start using it on posts that didn't include HITs and the moderators would have to remove them all. It would get bad enough that we would constantly have to yell at people to stop, and we were even considering resorting to bans at one point. It was just a mess that I don't think any of us really care to repeat here.

 

[clickhappier]

The problem with this is favoritism. We were accused of this several times on MTG because we were often taking part in the nominations. We weren't really picking favorites, but we were just trying to nominate people that we thought were helpful and were being overlooked. Yet the accusations were still there, and it was even implied that we were influencing the voting somehow by nominating certain members. If we're going to have a community award, I would rather have that award come from the community, without the need for staff involvement (I'm not saying the staff can't be involved. I just don't want the staff to have any more influence over who wins than anyone else does.)

Hm, I didn't notice the staff-nominated people winning particularly more often than the non-staff's nominations; especially since the nominations were re-posted in the voting thread without saying who they came from. I believe both of my wins there were from non-staff nominations those times. Haven't actually gone back through all the past results to say for sure, though, but I doubt most people even remembered who nominated whom when they went to vote, other than if they nominated someone themselves.

So it sounds like we're down to 'let non-staff people nominate people, and then everybody votes', with maybe some sort of kadauchi-scored HIT-posting recognition as a second award. There's no perfect solution that can please everybody on this, but the MTG awards seemed to be well-liked overall despite a few complainants.

 

[Lepi]

...It looks like this is going to pretty much be a popularity contest, in one way or another, no matter what you do. Because all of the stuff that's been proposed to keep things objective are subject to futzing. Averaging in the hourly rate require people to report their hourly rate and could easily be skewed one way or the other just based on personal variables. Basing it on TO scores is similarly problematic, because a good HIT can have shit TO and vice versa. Trusting people to use a button responsibly is unrealistic.

Which is OK. Theoretically people who are unhelpful and obnoxious aren't going to be particularly popular anyway.

 

[Twirdman]

My concern would be in that some HITs show up multiple times throughout the day, or a batch reloads under the same ID.

Someone posts an awesome HIT at 2 in the morning. They get Awesome'd.

The same HIT shows up at 11:00 and someone else posts it, but the first person gets Awesome'd again?

Right right I was thinking about it from more of a survey rather than batch perspective, which is odd I almost never do surveys anyway. I'd say maybe based on number of hits in the batch, but there are surveys now with multiple hits in the batch. Not really sure there is a good solution for this. At least not one that can be automated to any high degree.

 

[clickhappier]

Right right I was thinking about it from more of a survey rather than batch perspective, which is odd I almost never do surveys anyway. I'd say maybe based on number of hits in the batch, but there are surveys now with multiple hits in the batch. Not really sure there is a good solution for this. At least not one that can be automated to any high degree.

And the earlier someone posts a batch, the better, but it might not be done loading for a while (number of HITs in it still increasing)...

 

[Twirdman]

And the earlier someone posts a batch, the better, but it might not be done loading for a while (number of HITs in it still increasing)...

Well I was meaning assigning value. I was thinking any batch posted and liked would go to whoever posted that batch and got liked, but surveys would go to the first person who posted the survey. We would call anything that had greater than 1 hit a batch, but that isn't perfect.

 

[electrolyte]

Setting aside the whole issue of "how do we count what is a great HIT and how many times it's posted and at what frequency or not", I think we want the award to be also about awesome members who don't necessarily post the best/fastest/most HITs. There are plenty of members who contribute by helping others, writing content, scripts, answering questions, and aren't posting HITs. I don't want the award to come down to simply who posts the top number of HITs as calculated by a scraping script set up a specific way. That doesn't take into consideration awesome members who aren't prolific HIT posters.