Human beings being, well, human like to be rewarded. Many boards use a points or karma system to reward frequent or effective members of their community. The problem in my opinion is, however, that whenever there is a reward to be gained, people (again, being human) will look for shortcuts or ways to “game” the system. That can have a negative impact on your board. Is it worth setting some sort of reward point system up on your board? What can be gained or lost as a result?

In this post I will share some experiences as a board participant as well as a board owner. I would love to hear your stories as well; the comment form is always open. As long as you can manage to click the right checkbox.

Post Count

I will start with the most basic reward system of all… something that is included in every version of phpBB as well as most (if not all) other discussion board software packages. I am referring to, of course, the ubiquitous post count.

Post count is simple. Every time you make a post your post count increments by one. Every time a post is deleted, your post count is reduced. It’s a simple process that does not add much overhead to your board. (Reduced overhead is one of the reasons why pruning doesn’t reduce post counts.) The post count by itself is already a bit of a reward (my post count is bigger than yours) but board owners don’t have to stop there. phpBB board owners have the option of setting up ranks. As your post count goes up, you attain higher rank status. It’s a simple reward, yet still subject to abuse.

As a result, one of the commonly requested MODs for phpBB2 (and a built-in feature for phpBB3) is the option for board owners to specify certain forums where post counts are not adjusted. The Off Topic forum at my big board is configured this way via custom code that I wrote for phpBB2. The General Discussion forum at phpbb.com is also set this way. The idea is to be able to remove the reward for bad behavior and improve the overall community experience.

Even before phpBB3 was available they had removed all rank titles at phpbb.com because people would spam that last few dozen (or hundred) posts just to get to the next rank. The reward (higher rank) was minimal. Yet it didn’t stop some board members from attempting to game the system by posting stupid stuff just to inflate their post count.

Even if you think this is harmless… it’s not. I have seen people complain about other posters and call them “post whores” or “spammers” just because they seem to be piling up the posts at a rapid rate. Perhaps their post quality isn’t up to the same quality, but does that really mean they’re abusing the system? Maybe they’re just enthusiastic participants with a different posting style. Maybe they really are active and effective members of your community.

Or maybe they are spammers. Either way if it causes discord with more established board members it’s a problem that impacts you as a board owner.

eBay-Style Feedback

Another commonly requested MOD is for something like eBay-style feedback. Some readers might not remember this, but I do as I was already a member of eBay when these adjustments had to take place. One of the most important features of the eBay community is the feedback system. However in the early days people could log in and issue feedback to anyone they wanted to. Feedback was not tied to an actual transaction. As a result eBay became aware of feedback practices where one person would register a number of accounts and issue positive feedback for themself. Or two people would swap positive feedbacks… either from a single or multiple accounts. How was this fixed?

eBay quickly altered the feedback process so that only buyers and sellers can issue feedback to each other. They also adjusted it so that multiple transactions between the same buyer and seller do not increment the overall feedback total. For example I have 173 transactions related to my account, yet my feedback score (which is 100% positive) is only 128. That’s to prevent me from participating in a bunch of small transactions, all resulting in positive feedback, but from the same seller.

I considered writing an eBay feedback system for one client but dropped it for several reasons. First of all I quickly realized that the system would have to include plenty of checks and balances (just like eBay) to try to prevent abuse. Second, I realized that no matter how smart I was, there were other people that were smarter (or at least had more time) that would figure out some form of abuse that I had not anticipated. But the final straw was the potential client ran a site that was designed to swap software codes and supported software piracy. You can see why they were interested in a feedback system. Once I realized what the site was about I declined to do any more work for them.

The eBay style of system is fairly specialized and probably doesn’t make sense for most boards. What about karma or topic points? That’s much more common. In fact, I have a points system on my largest board.

Topic Points

Several years ago I got a request to add “points” to my largest board. I talked it over with several moderators, as I was not in favor of the idea. I flat-out rejected the idea of rating a person (sometimes called “karma” points) right away. And I didn’t really want to create a post-rating system either, as each post is assigned to a user. What I came up with was a topic rating system.

In this system people can only provide a positive point. There are no negative points allowed. You can assign a point to a topic that you found useful, and you can later remove that point if you choose to do so. But you cannot assign a negative point to counteract someone else’s positive point. I thought that would eliminate or at least aleviate one of the areas of abuse.

I also adjusted the search system so that topics with points (in theory the more helpful topics have more points) would be weighted higher. I seeded my FAQ topics with 10 points to start with so that they would show up at the top of search results. So far everything was working great.

But remember my board users are human too… always looking for an edge. At one point I was cruising around the board and I noticed a topic with points but no replies. The philosophy behind the topic point is that a person read the topic and found it useful. I thought to myself, hmmm, perhaps someone posted a technical tip that was really well received and people gave it points without replying.

Ummm, no. That wasn’t the case at all. When I read the post, I determined that someone had entered the post and then immediately assigned their own question a point. Why? To draw attention to it. It was a quick and easy way to make their topic stand out. (It worked; it caught my attention.) And it was also an abuse of the intent of the system.

When I rewrote a good bit of my board for a major upgrade earlier this year one this was one of the things I fixed. How? I added code to prevent someone from assigning a point to their own topic until at least one other person had replied. I didn’t prevent someone else from assigning a point (in case it really was just a good technical note that didn’t require a reply) but the original poster cannot apply a point until someone else replies.

Such a simple system, yet even it was abused.

Other Patterns of Abuse

There are plenty of other ways karma or point systems can be abused. I’ve already mentioned some (you give me points, I will give you points in return). What are some others?

I recently read a long topic on a huge support board for SAP. (Their community has over a million members. ) They recently added points, and of course their system got abused. People would karma swap. People would post simple questions using an alias and then answer them with their regular account, just so they could award themself the point. They used to give out t-shirts and provide other recognition to the top “point getters” on the board, so of course people had incentive to abuse the system.

So this year rather than reward individuals, SAP (the company) agreed to donate 100,000 Euros to organizations designed to feed and educate children in underdeveloped countries if a certain level of points was attained. There is still a reward, but now it’s for someone else instead of for the individuals. Has it helped? Ask me again at the end of the year and I will tell you how the experiment went.

Conclusion

People… you need them to make your board a success. But give them (some of them, not everybody) the opportunity and they will take advantage of you. Before you add any sort of points or karma system to your board, I suggest that you think about exactly what sort of behavior you want to reward… because that’s what you’re going to see as a result.

In the next post on the subject of board points I am going to share some very specific details from another board I help manage. In this case the reward was cash… actual cash, not fake cash or e-points. If ever there was an incentive for abuse, that’s one. So of course people looked for (and found) ways to abuse the system. Some of them were quite creative.