A new feature has been available in the forums for approximately 1,5 months now. As mentioned in this Point for Points- Reward yourself, you get rewarded for assigning points for useful answers to your initial forum post.
As mentioned in an From the Grumpy Old Man: SDN Kindergarten Grumpy there has been some ambiguity about the point system or Recognition Program concerning forum posts. There have been a lot of forum posts where the original poster didn’t come back to reward points. It got off to a slow start, but it seems that the attitude is changing where one is ready to reciprocate and reward points. With the risk of getting (again) into the discussion of point hunting and whether a pointing system is really needed in order to help others, it gives the poster of the answer a better feeling. One at least gets the impression that one isn’t just talking to the walls and that one is actually getting some reaction.
You might have noticed in my signature the new feature when I post an answer to forum threads: I’m a big fan of this new system. And no, I am NOT a point’s hunter. I guess that after all these years I’ve already gathered some points. It is clear that this new feature has benefits and thus needs promotion. It would be nice if info about it was to be included in FAQs and notification mails. Update: Gali rightfully pointed out that the latter is already available.
On the other hand, I want to put in a caveat against certain practices. You know that only one point per thread is assigned for rewarding points. Even that single point can make people greedy and miserly. I’ve seen posts where someone has given a perfect answer – no, not by me - without any flaw in the argument. The question poster rewards with only the absolute minimum, and even gets a point for that. I don’t think this was the philosophy behind this mechanism.
There is an issue that isn’t solved by the new feature though. Sometimes people seem to forget to close the thread when their query has been answered. Therefore John suggested having an Re: Suggestion: Automatic Timer for closing threads after X time. This is a really nice idea. The negativist in me even suggested punishing the question poster by subtracting points when the timer needs to close it for them. The more positive approach is indeed to give an extra reward when a thread is closed before an automatic timer does it. It seems to work for rewarding answers, so it might help over here too. The goal is to decrease the amount of open threads.
“But what about questions that aren’t answered (properly)?” you’d say. It isn’t normal that you don’t get an answer after X time. If you don’t get an answer in e.g. the ABAP forum, your question is a rather difficult one. Maybe you could consider reformulating the question in order to make it more understandable.
It all depends as well of course on what you expect as an answer. It can never be the intention that other people make whole applications or analyses for you, so that all you need to do is to copy/paste them.
Having said this, please share your thoughts/feelings/experiences/… about the new rewarding feature in this forum Which type of SDN Ubergeek/BPX suit are you?.
P.S. Which type of SDN Ubergeek/BPX suit are Which type of SDN Ubergeek/BPX suit are you??
