Monday, September 8, 2008

Earning Reputation Points



Earning Reputation Points

Brainify is very new. In order to turn this site into a great student resource, it needs to have a strong collection of great academic websites, and it needs members. So right now the greatest need of this community is to grow its user base and the number of collected websites.

As such, recommending Brainify to a friend and being the first to collect useful websites are the two fastest routes to a high reputation. But remember, your reputation is only increased when your recommended friends contribute to the community, or when other members show that they’ve found the sites you’ve collected to be useful. Read on for details of how your reputation is built.


We try our best to align the reputation calculation to be consistent with growing the best possible site for University and College students. The community needs will change over time, and I expect the reputation emphasis to change along with it. At the time of writing, you earn reputation points roughly as follows:

  • When people you recommend join Brainify, for every 4 points they have, you get one point. It is important that they indicate you as their recommender - you will not start collecting these points until they do.
  • If you were the first to collect a certain website in Brainify, you earn points every time other users demonstrate that it is useful to the community. For example, you earn a point every time someone else adds it to their collection. You also earn points if it is rated highly, or can lose points if it is rated very poorly.
  • If you were the first to categorize a website as belonging to a particular topic, you gain points if the community feels it is an appropriate categorization, and may lose points if the community feels it is a poor or inappropriate categorization.
  • If you make a comment about a site, you earn points every time someone rates the comment highly, or lose points if it is rated very poorly.
  • If you create a group that the community finds to be useful, you can gain a large number of points.
  • If you answer someone’s question, you earn a lot of points if the answer is rated highly. Although you won’t lose points for a poorly rated answer, you won’t gain any either.
  • If you are the first to use a tag to describe some website, and others use the same tag (i.e. they agree that you've made an intelligent choice), you get points for that.
  • If you ask a question, you get points every time it is rated highly.
  • Finally, you get points if you place an image in your profile, and if you indicate your year level and academic category (what degree or diploma you are working on) in your profile.

That's it for now. As I say, this almost certainly will change over time. If we manage to grow this site into something useful with a large community of members, my intention is to form a working group of intelligent and unbiased brainify members and academics to manage the reputation governance. As much as possible, this should be done by the community - not one person.

Take care - Murray

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This probably interests readers of thisblog: I have just added an Economics Reference List (http://crisismaven.wordpress.com/references/) to my economics blog with economic data series, history, bibliographies etc. for students & researchers. Currently over 200 meta sources, it will in the next days grow to over a thousand. Check it out and if you miss something, feel free to leave a comment.