With both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET we provide a great deal of control over the features &  behaviour of our products using what we call permission sets. Whilst permission sets work well and provide a very fine level of control over the features available the responsibility for assigning these permission sets still falls with an administrator within either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET.

To provide further flexibility we are thinking of offering an option to link permission sets to specific member levels allowing users to unlock features within our products as there reputation increases and they progress to the next level.

Applying a new permission set based on reputation has a number of uses…

InstantForum.NET

• You could disable PMs for users until they reach a specific member level. For example "Junior Member". This requires they have posted at least 10 posts. This would avoid the problem of spammers creating a genuine account within your forum and then PM'ing members with links etc.
• You could limit access to certain profile fields until a user has enough reputation.
• You could automatically allow users with a very high reputation to edit any posts / act like a moderator.

InstantKB.NET

• You could automatically approve comments for members who have enough reputation. This will reduce the manual approval of comments if enabled.
  
• You could allow users who have enough reputation to add or edit articles. You would create a workflow as an administrator and ensure the content goes through an approval process before being published.
• You could customize which fields are visible alongside articles based on reputation. For exmaple those with a very hgih reputation ay be able to see the status of a particular item within InstantKB.NET whilst others only see basic meta data.

These are the most obvious ideas however there are lots of possibilities if we link member levels into our existing permission set system. To goal would be to reward uses for participating in your community or knowledgebase by unlocking features as reputation increases.

I would welcome any feedback. Do you feel this would make things to complex or do you like the idea :)


Kindest Regards,

Ryan Healey



ryan@instantasp.co.uk
www.instantasp.co.uk
Blog | Community | Docs

   

I would also like "reputation" to be something that's programmable.  You know, like a plug-in.  My concept of "reputation" isn't going to be anywhere near what someone elses idea of "reputation" is.  One person may believe that post count is all it takes, while another might want a complicated algorithm to do the math. 

In fact, you should probably put the reputation score into a field in the DB (instead of calculating on the fly - in case the calculation is complicated or "expensive" to run).  Allow the calculation to be re-calculated at a configurable interval (essentially, this is cacheing the value in the DB).

Thanks for listening...definitely a good feature idea.

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Al Bsharah: Twitter / Blog
Aholics.com:

I swear sometimes you have access to our feature list :)

Have you seen the way we do reputation within InstantKB Al? This allows you to configure the points rewarded for performing various actions within InstantKB . For example posting a comment or rating an article. We'll be moving in this direction with future versions of InstantForum.

If you have any suggestions where we should reward points within the forum don't hesitate to respond :)

Thank you as always for your suggestions.


Kindest Regards,

Ryan Healey



ryan@instantasp.co.uk
www.instantasp.co.uk
Blog | Community | Docs

   

I wouldnt see anything wrong with having it as an option that people can chose to do so, however in my experience it is not usually a good thing for a community. reputation in itself can become somewhat of a popularity contest at times.