Spongehammer, like Tom said, you'll get most of that back when the badge Rep is brought back online.

I really like the revamped rep system for site activity. Looks well-balanced, and encourages community-strengthening activities.

Of course, I'm missing 3,000 rep since this morning =P but hopefully most of that comes back with the badges. Thanks for posting the rep tallies!

Yeah, it's pretty telling that two or three people a month were getting the badge consistently until 7 months ago, and that's the last anyone's been awarded.

Found the Princess Badge

I think I read somewhere that the Princess quest is currently suspended, something I didn't come across until well after I'd already scanned through every line of source code on that page and beat my head against the wall. =P

It would accomplish that, but it would also put users on vastly different scales of rep. Right now there's a reasonable rep distribution wherein there's a gradual and pretty common-sense progression from the most casual users up through Kyatric. (Ashley's obviously a very special case.)

Users like Yann and R0J0 provide continual, high-quality content on the forums: even if they only received 1 rep per "like" or "thanks," they'd receive a base of 2 points per post, plus on average 5-10 additional rep (because sometimes only one person would hit "thanks" and other times 350 users would all hit it).

If retroactively applied, I could see Yann going from 7K to an absolute minimum of 12K -- and maybe that's fair, but unless he drops off the planet, we would see a few users with stratospheric and untouchable rep. That's not necessarily wrong, but it's the sort of thing Tom and Ashley consider whenever they rebalance rep.

With the "Favorite User" option, there would be that huge initial jump as 80 people all add the ten most helpful people on the site, but it might fairly reflect the additional value they bring, and there would be a gentle but steady progression after that as new users join and recognize their contributions.

Tom,

Thanks for the behind-the-scenes look! I understand the categories and values are just placeholders, but it's still cool to see even in a preliminary fashion which behaviors and effects are considered for rep.

It would really skew things toward a few people in particular, but I wonder if it's possible to capture some of the extra value users like Yann and R0J0hound provide (just to pick two). It might not, and they already have a ton of rep from just posting, but really, when I make a post, let's say most of the time it has a value to the community of 1, and occasionally a 2 or 3, and the odd 4 or 5, on a scale of 1-5. I'd say at least half the time either of them post, they're hitting 4s and 5s, and their lesser posts are 2s and 3s.

It's going to be impossible to truly quantify a user's actual, "real-life" reputation on the site, and the rep system would probably break if we could upvote forum posts, because every time Yann or R0J0hound plops off a page-long string of events with an accompanying capx, 300 users are all going to click with reckless abandon.

I wouldn't have any idea how to express in Rep the intangible value a friendly, welcoming, but technically non-savvy user brings, who nonetheless makes the site a desirable hangout for other users and who elevates the reputation of the Scirra/Construct brand.

Hm, what if you could "favorite" users in general, separately from tutorials? Sure, it would blow up Kyatric/Yann/R0J0/etc., but it would stabilize quickly thereafter and maybe capture some of those intangibles.

Added, bladesquad, although maybe the site would be easier to navigate if it didn't open in a separate flash window?

I'm glad it was informative, — As for my place on the chart, I'm cool working my up, and there are a lot of legendarily valuable community members well ahead of me I won't/shouldn't be catching any time soon. =P

There you go. Use this code, and remove the asterisks:

http://static1.scirra.net/arcade/games/3085/card-long.png

Props to labithiotis for his previous "How Do I" info on this.

Test

kill0byte, you might need to convert your signature to the forum BBCode, instead of HTML.

Woot!

Thanks a ton, Tom!