Looking at p0ison's post about the forum statistics, it seems like there are a lot of member and non-member lurkers who are viewing reports. This helps the forum gain in advertising capture, and helps the lurkers, but doesn't seem to adequately reward those who are putting in the time to create the content. This is especially true if a majority of lurking members are Newbies who can only award very few points/acceptance. If there are only truly about 50-60 regular members who are actively participating, this means the report poster must capture the attention of one of these 50-60 guys to get any amount of substantial points; and as we know, everyone has different tastes and these 50-60 guys may not be into the information the report has to offer. For example, I'm only into HE massages, and I don't punt often, most of my reports don't get many points. As a result, my level is low, and I can only give up to 2 karma per report.
Some Ideas: (Keep in mind i'm not a tech savvy guy; I have no idea if these are possible or not on this platform)
Is there any way to award points to report posters from the views? For example, can we award one point for 300 views (unique IPs), with a maximum of 20 points per post which can be earned in this way? (the numbers I put in this calculation are totally random, @p0ison can probably look at the statistics and see what is actually fair).
Is there any way to give the member the ability to give karma or acceptance without going to another webpage? It is cumbersome to do this on Safari as the webpage doesn't automatically redirect
From my brief participation, it seems reports with pictures (even if they are from the DB) get more points than those without. However, in my opinion, it is very cumbersome to add pictures due to the size restriction, requires me to do some extra steps. Is there a way to get the system to reduce the file size after the user uploads it?
Most reports are pretty long and with pictures, mostly because Newbies can see these types of reports will result in more points awarded. However, it is deterring users from posting short reports; this is good and bad. Good - forum maintains strong quality. Bad - forum members who may not be reporting at all, as they see reporting as too long of a time commitment. For example, it would be useful for viewers to know if a provider is average, above average, or below average. Most people will post if the experience is completely awesome or absolute crap; but average experiences seem not to be reported on. Thus, there is a lack of information on this forum about average providers. My own theory is that I would much rather try out a provider that someone on this forum has marked as average, than one that isn't reviewed at all. How can we incentivize users to write even short reports without the quality of the forum going down? Can the system do a word or letter count on the report and mark it as a short report, with short reports having a cap of say 25 max points? Also, can the system require the reports in the Newbie Section be "long" so the forum isn't spammed with crap/junk?
Finally, is there a way to pre-populate the text field when a user starts the report with the report template? It's easy enough on a computer to copy and paste the template, however, I find this is more difficult on a smartphone.
Hope my comments are helpful. | |
