A New Way to Generate Karma

[ShanePike]

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday trying to understand the karma equation (Pligg's, not the universe's), but ultimately abandoned it because of this one factor: a user who had registered and posted a single link that day had the highest karma of any user on my site -- many of whom had been submitting, voting, and commenting regularly. Maybe it will be different when my Pligg-powered site is getting 1,000 (or 10,000) visits/day (rather than 100), but right now the built-in karma function doesn't provide the results I'm looking for.

So today I wrote my own. It's pretty basic, but I wanted to share it because it will be easy for others to modify to suit their particular situation.

A few notes:
1. It uses a pure points system, not a 1 to 20 scale like the original karma. (There may be a good reason for the scale, so I may change that later.)

2. For my site, I'm outputting a Top Contributors list to a text file for display in the sidebar so we don't hit the database on every page load. If you want to do that, you'll need to change the location of the text file in the fopen command near the end to match whatever you want to use. If you don't want to create the file, you can delete everything after "Output the List."

3. The variables at the top control the scores. You'll definitely want to adjust those based on what habits you want to encourage in your users.

I know I've forgotten something, so let me know if you have questions!

[fingerprn]

I'm looking forward to taking a look at it. I solved your first problem by making it so that a new member can't be listed as a top contributor for at least 10 days. During that time, their karma starts dropping unless they continue to contribute. It's not a perfect solution, but it keeps spammers from suddenly being a top contributor.

[ChuckRoast]

ShanePike

Great contribution. We've been talking about making some drastic changes to the karma system because it really hasn't changed since the first beta and most people either are not aware of it or don't know how to use it/

At this point looking at anything fresh from a contributer is totally cool.

I was tossing around the idea of a rule-set determined on karma score. For example. A new user may have to enter captcha when entering a comment but someone who has a higher score does not.

Possibly having certain modules only available to members as they grow along with the site based on rank.

It's nice to see a good conversation in here for a change.

Refreshing

[ditto]

...I solved your first problem by making it so that a new member can't be listed as a top contributor for at least 10 days. During that time, their karma starts dropping unless they continue to contribute...

May i ask how you did that?

[ShanePike]

Thanks, ChuckRoast. I appreciate it. I haven't been using Pligg long (just a month or two now), but I've become a big fan. I'm still very wary of making newbie mistakes, but I figured if I uploaded this script and got blasted, at least I'd learn something

[davemackey]

Very nice job. Thanks!
Dave.

[sircommy]

great job, gonna check it myself also

[rubber2002]

Great Job ShanePike. Thanks

[Andtony]

Thanks. Sounds good I will try it.

[nuki]

If I like to add sidebar_topcontributors.inc in my sidebar...how can I write the line?

May be something that...

{assign var=sidebar_module value="Karma"}{include file=$the_template_sidebar_modules."/sidebar_topcontributors.inc"}


Thanks