CG Forum Awards

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Originally Posted by cilu

At some point I thought of "best off-topic reply" award. And then I realize that's not a good idea since it can determine people to post creazy/funny/i-don't-know-what off-topic messages just to win the annual award for "best off-topic reply". And besides, off-topic messages, thought a vivid reality, are prohibited by the Acceptable Use Policy.

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I thnk that has promise with some modifications. I remember one thread in the c# forum (which I think you were involved with Cilu) where the original question was something about appending an integer to a string or something like that. the thread starter got the answer pretty quick, but then a competition started on the most efficient way to do it. there ended up being some posts where the solution was (aparantly) super efficient, but you would never use that in your day-to-day programming. IMO, it became an "out of control thread", but was still very interesting and at times funny to watch.

I think having a CG Forum Awards is a great way of showing that CodeGuru recognizes members' efforts in giving/helping others find solutions to their coding problems/questions. :thumb:

Having a CGFA Committee is another great idea. But, I wonder who will delegate people as such? One way of doing this is by (a) having members nominate/vote who should be in this committee OR (b) ask a trusted Moderator and/or Admin to list qualified members to be a member of the Committee.

Anyways, first and foremost... I hope Moderators, Admins, and other CG superiors agree to Cilu's proposal/suggestion. :)

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Originally Posted by cilu

Please do not hijack the thread with way off-topic replies. Thank you.

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Just discovered the crazy Google maps and was curious to apply it to LL provided by a few members since it is the Feedback forum - Sorry for that cilu.

Good Idea, althou I'll never win :blush:

I'm waiting with impatience to hang my CGFAs near the PL/SQL Brainbench certificate (that was not the best but hardest to obtain for me)... :D ;)

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Originally Posted by ovidiucucu

I'm waiting with impatience to hang my CGFAs near the PL/SQL Brainbench certificate (that was not the best but hardest to obtain for me)... :D ;)

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Take it slowly, you're not a winner already. You're not even nominated. ;)

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Originally Posted by cilu

Take it slowly, you're not a winner already. You're not even nominated. ;)

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Yeah, but I must be ready for everything. :D

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Originally Posted by cilu

Take it slowly, you're not a winner already. You're not even nominated. ;)

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Lets stick to the original point.
But how come none of the admins has not posted his/her comments regarding this.

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Originally Posted by vb_the_best

But how come none of the admins has posted his/her comments regarding this.

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<I'm going to use ovidiucucu as an example in this post... no offense intended, just using him as an example>

Because of the issues this could causeand because of work this could require. Some examples:

Is it the thread that is awarded or is it a person that is awarded? In most cases that have been suggested it is a thread, so ovidiucucu wouldn't be able to take credit since a thread is multiple people's posts.

Awarding polls and such could lead to people posting simply to try to be recognized for their thread. I don't know that this is bad, but it doesn't necessarily seem to be a good thing.

If we award someone for the best job at helping people, and if ovidiucucu has a better reputation, larger post count, etc. then is he going to get mad or upset? How many other people will too? We've nominated people here for MVP awards from Microsoft and Microsoft didn't select them. At least one of those people now posts a lot less and is grumpy more often. Would we cause the same issue with these awards?

Who determines what criteria make a thread the best? If it helps with my problem and it is the most complicated problem I'm dealing with, is that the best? Everyone has different problems, so every 'judge' would have a different criteria. Or do you let everyone nominate whatever threads they want and the 'judges' narrow it down to the 'finalists' for voting?

Can the 'judges' have an item in a category that is being created?

I won't even begin to comment on what kind of noise the "free your mind award" could start causing in the forums.... (Sounds fun, but...)

What about articles. Should those be included too?

What about the "most reputable", "most rated", "most prolific", and other award type (These would be easy because they would be based on mechanisms already in place ;) ).

Also, what about the "best admin who is active on the board" award? Seems to me that there should be money, prizes, trips, and more associated with this specific award..... ;)

Having said all this....
I've actually thought about something similar in the past. I even looked for icons and goofed around with trying to set up the icon on the forum so that if we awarded someone they would have an icon showing. Now that the forum software works better, I need to try to do that again.

I'm not against doing awards and making it a yearly thing. What we need to determine however, is awards that don't get in the way of the forum. By that I mean awards that cause unwanted posts to be created. Additionally, we can award threads, but that type of award would go to the thread and not any individual within the thread. Finally, if doing something like this causes problems for several members, then we would probably disban it.

So now an admin has chimed in.... ;)

Brad!

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Originally Posted by Brad Jones

If we award someone for the best job at helping people, and if ovidiucucu has a better reputation, larger post count, etc. then is he going to get mad or upset?

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Not much more upset than William Shockley who deserved three Nobel prizes and took only one (and that shared with other two people). :D

Thanks Brad for your comments. First, I don't want anything that would offend some people or create problems in the forums (like posting just to get an award). The list of awards that I have provided is just a proposal. Doesn't mean that I want to stick to it.

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Is it the thread that is awarded or is it a person that is awarded? In most cases that have been suggested it is a thread, so ovidiucucu wouldn't be able to take credit since a thread is multiple people's posts.

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No, the award is for the thread, not for the member that created it.

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Awarding polls and such could lead to people posting simply to try to be recognized for their thread. I don't know that this is bad, but it doesn't necessarily seem to be a good thing.

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Yes, there may be people that will try to create polls just to win this award. But how many polls would that be? If you look at the number of polls out of the total number of threads you'll see it's quite small. Personally I don't expect that number to increase significantly, to the extent of polluting the forums all over with undesired polls.

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If we award someone for the best job at helping people, and if ovidiucucu has a better reputation, larger post count, etc. then is he going to get mad or upset? How many other people will too? We've nominated people here for MVP awards from Microsoft and Microsoft didn't select them. At least one of those people now posts a lot less and is grumpy more often. Would we cause the same issue with these awards?

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Yes, that is something I would definitelly like to avoid too. I was trying to avoid categories that would led to that. Probably if we drop the best breakthrough and best contributor much of that concern should disappear.

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Who determines what criteria make a thread the best? If it helps with my problem and it is the most complicated problem I'm dealing with, is that the best? Everyone has different problems, so every 'judge' would have a different criteria. Or do you let everyone nominate whatever threads they want and the 'judges' narrow it down to the 'finalists' for voting?

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Well, basically there should be a criteria. I'll come back with some proposals for that too.

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Can the 'judges' have an item in a category that is being created?

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Who exactly would be the judges here? The awards winners would be voted by everyone that want to take part in the voting. If you refer to the members of CGFA group or "comitee" (as I called it) then I don't see why not. Just that one should be disallowed to propose for nominalization a thread/post/poll of his/hers.

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What about the "most reputable", "most rated", "most prolific", and other award type (These would be easy because they would be based on mechanisms already in place ).

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Well, all this categories should be avoided, especially those about rating. I don't want to see in all people's signature "If it helped, please rate me (to win the award)", let alone create any kind of trouble between members because of the rating. About categories like "most prolific"/"most posts" that is pointless anyway, because there is no competition here. Andreas doesn't have a challenger. :D

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Also, what about the "best admin who is active on the board" award?

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Well, as I already said (not exactly with these words) I was actually thinking at categories where would be some kind of competition, where everyone get's a chance to a nominalization, not something that would be decided before the voting or the proposal start.

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Seems to me that there should be money, prizes, trips, and more associated with this specific award.....

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:D Brad, that would mean to take from one pocket and put it in the other... ;)

I did not propose any prizes since I'm not in the position of offering prizes. And if the awards go to threads not to people, then who would take the prizes anyway?

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What we need to determine however, is awards that don't get in the way of the forum. By that I mean awards that cause unwanted posts to be created. Additionally, we can award threads, but that type of award would go to the thread and not any individual within the thread. Finally, if doing something like this causes problems for several members, then we would probably disban it.

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I agree with you.

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Originally Posted by Brad Jones

Awarding polls and such could lead to people posting simply to try to be recognized for their thread. I don't know that this is bad, but it doesn't necessarily seem to be a good thing.

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That's exactly the problem, IMO. In the past, there have always been a few individuals who seemed to post any nonsense just to see their total post count go up. Since the reputation system has been introduced, that situation has somewhat aggravated: Although the reputation points honor quality (and not quantity), an increasing number of posters seem to post just for the sake of getting "those little green squares" (interestingly, the guys who have something like "if this helped, don't forget to rate" in their signature are often those who make the most useless posts - wild guesses or advice which is just plain wrong. So I don't know if an additional metric (like awards) will help increasÃ*ng the quality of posts, or rather attract more award hunters who will post anything just to get an award.

Well, I don't see these awards something that one is supposed to put in his/her CV (50 years from now one, when they will be as famous as Oscars or Nobels, yes, but not now :D). Nor to indicate the winners by another icons, gems or whatever, which probably would make people craving for awards.

Frankly, the first idea that I had was to have only funny awards, something that you see in the MTV movie awards, like: best action sequence, best kiss, best on-screen team, etc. (These are the MTV categories, not CG ;) ) Then I thought that we could do this something more serious, though not the Nobels equivalent.

I think it worths giving a try.

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Originally Posted by gstercken

That's exactly the problem, IMO. In the past, there have always been a few individuals who seemed to post any nonsense just to see their total post count go up. Since the reputation system has been introduced, that situation has somewhat aggravated: Although the reputation points honor quality (and not quantity), an increasing number of posters seem to post just for the sake of getting "those little green squares" (interestingly, the guys who have something like "if this helped, don't forget to rate" in their signature are often those who make the most useless posts - wild guesses or advice which is just plain wrong. So I don't know if an additional metric (like awards) will help increasÃ*ng the quality of posts, or rather attract more award hunters who will post anything just to get an award.

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Complete acknowledge. This is exactly why I have my reservations against reputation systems in general. It happened with the old rating system here as well...and after we installed the new forum software...suddenly they disappeared...

People who are attracted by that always try to find ways to increase their rating/reputation/whatever by any means. Games like "You rate me, I rate you' have always been played with these systems in place and will most likely always be played. It happens here, it happens on any other forum as well...short term for that is simply human nature I guess... ;)

Thus...the reputation of a member cannot be indicated by points, squares, stars etc. but always by looking at his/her answers...the longer one sticks around in forums the easier he get to know the real quality posters...reputation systems or post counts in any flavour can only be used as an indication... ;)

I am in complete agreement.

I have said this previously, in so many arguments that I can't even remember - even in the reviewer's forum.

I disagree with rating systems on a site like this.

This site is about helping people, and not about "getting an extra dot" on your posts.

Personally, I try not to care. However when I see people like Cilu etc with 5 green and 4 bright green spots, I have to think "how did they get those" and more to the point "are they just frequenting the forums which will give them ratings".

Of course I know this is probably not case, but there you go : exactly the effect I was trying to avoid. Helping people is helping people, and if they don't rate so what ?

I spend most of my time these days in the C# forum - and people don't generally rate here.

It makes me feel bad because I feel I'm getting left behind.

I fought against these darned things and they still went through : I think they should be removed and everyone lose this "competitive" aspect to the forums and just get on with what's important : helping people.

Anyway - I think the awards is a great idea, but I would think that a monthly basis would be better with yearly awards going from those.

Darwen.