Hi everyone,
Thank you all for the feedback. It is mostly positive and I appreciate the support and replies.
A couple of comments:
Henrique Pinto you are spot on. It is, indeed, sad that we are removing points for replies liked in the discussion forums. I thought these like points would be a good way for anyone (not just the original poster) to express their appreciation for good content that helped them. But unfortunately there was so much cheating that the negative impact was perceived as greater than the positive impact. Unfortunately this is life. C'est la vie. People with good intentions suffer for decisions made because others don't respect the rules. This doesn't just happen on SCN, right?
To be honest I'd rather see less noise in the forums - and maybe less helpful content - than all the point cheating that was recently going on. But I'm an observer and community manager, and I don't rely on the SCN forums to solve my problems at work, so maybe I have no right to say that!
Thank you for mentioning Stackoverflow Henrique, because I'm a big fan. In case you don't know it yet. Stackoverflow is where I think we should go, and it's been the topic of discussions when we talk about reputation systems. Stackoverflow is a true reputation system, and it works: giving certain rights to people who have accrued reputation after posting quality content… This gets my vote any time!
' MoazzaM ' interesting thought that has already crossed our mind: showing only badges and levels. Audrey and I had discussions and that's all I will say for now ;-)
More generally there have been discussions here and there around the content of messages and replies. Is "thank you" valuable or not? I don't think we'll all ever agree on this, and my opinion is that it depends on the context. And as you can imagine it's difficult (impossible!) to automatically sort between the useless comments/replies and the useful ones. Recently I was reading Vijay Vijayasankar's post published on his personal site when he left SAP, and I couldn't help but notice that he was replying to every single comment, sometimes with just a few words. On SCN this may sometimes be perceived as "noise" when it may just be courtesy. In general I would advise everyone to wait a bit (a day or two) and observe comments received on a post, and then reply to more than one person in one comment/reply - like I'm doing it. It reduces the notifications and - hopefully - pleases people worried about the noise. Nowadays with the speed of internet and everyone connected via mobile, we expect others to reply to us right away. When there is no urgency, why rush? OK, I'll have to say it... I used to pick up the phone or wait a few days to get news from my friend in Paris when I was in high school. Yeah, it could take a couple of days to hear from her via - hum - a letter! Some of you remember these days, I'm not nostalgic but I think we can still pace ourselves. We're going very fast now and may miss important things in life. (oh my I'm getting too philosophical here).
To finish on this, the context is what matters. If I'm a newcomer on SCN and I publish my first ever blog or document, a Thank You for someone will mean a lot and encourage me to continue.
Happy to debate on this last paragraph, maybe over a beer/glass or wine than on this thread, since we could digress ;-)
If you feel a question in this thread has not been answered, or you want to hear from me, please let me know by replying here! There's quite a lot of things to read here :-)
Greetings from Sunny California (today at least).
Laure