How Leaderboards Work? A closer look at leaderboards in SCN

It’s been a two months since the launch of the gamification on SCN, during which the new “leaderboards” replaced the old “top participant lists” in each space. The new leaderboards come with exact numbers with which we hope we can introduce more transparency and encourage more engagement in the community.

The SCN Contributor Reputation Program FAQ updated at the launch already includes a pretty clear introduction of the leaderboards. What I want to do with this blog is to firstly draw some more attention to these new leaderboards in case you haven’t read the FAQ thoroughly, and secondly provide a little more insight on how the numbers are calculated.

The Top 20 SCN Members Leaderboard

I would like to start with the exception. The one leaderboard that is essentially different from all the others is located in the About SCN space, with the name “The Top 20 SCN Members Leaderboard”. And it’s different mainly in three aspects:

     1) It’s calculated based on lifetime points on SCN. Just like the points shown on your masthead, your bio tab or reputation tab when you log onto SCN, these points don’t expire.

     2) It’s calculated based on site-wide points on SCN. Again, just like the points shown on the masthead, bio tab or reputation tab, these points include all the points people have earned across the whole SCN. It’s thus often referred to as “the site-wide leaderboard” by us.

     3) It has the “My Rank” tab. So the leaderboard not only shows the 20 people that have the most points, but also gives you an idea where you stand among the hundreds of thousands of SCN members.

Space Leaderboards

At this point, it’s probably easy for you to guess some of the mechanism underlying all the leaderboards besides the one introduced above. These leaderboards appear in each space (including About SCN) with the same name: “12-month leaderboard”. They share the following attributes:

1) Each leaderboard only counts points that are earned in the space where it lives.

2) Each leaderboard only counts points that are earned within a 12-month period.

3) There’s no “My Rank” tab.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the “12-month period” in the second attribute. In the old point system, as some of you may remember, we used rolling points across the community. It had the intention to reflect how active people were in an up-to-date fashion, but it was a little bit discouraging especially in the way it recalculated – a member would post a new piece of content just to find out he or she lost some points because the contribution triggered a recalculation. So how about the new 12-month leaderboard? Is the recalculation problem resolved?

The answer is yes. In the 12-month leaderboard, the point changes caused by contribution are instant. So as you can tell, a member still needs to remain active to stay in the leaderboard, but the appearance that points are lost when a contribution is made no longer occurs.

I hope this blog answers your questions about the leaderboards. Of course if you still have any, or you have any other ideas/suggestions related to ranking and leaderboards, we are here to listen.