Some of you (ok, many of you) already noticed some changes to the Blog Dashboard this morning and have noticed some changes to how blog posts are scored recently. This is all part of our continuous evolution to try to keep things fair to members, both new and old. Handing out points is our way or rewarding those who help built the ActiveRain Real Estate Network. Having lots of points will result in lots of additional exposure on ActiveRain.com and Localism.com both to consumers and your peers.
While points result in a lot of complaints have also been one of biggest contributors to building what The Network is today. As a side effect they also help to encourage good business and blogging practices among members.
One of the hardest things to deal with is people who "game" the point system by doing things that are detramental to the success of this network to earn points. No one of the network appreciates that, and when we find it happening we will move to prevent it. As a rule of thumb we generally don't go back and historically adjust points (exception below).
We've gone through many evolutions of how we hand out points for blogging, each time has resulted in complaints from one group, or people finding another way to game the system. We realized the biggest reasons was we tried to be too transparent on how the scoring worked, which basically provided rules on how to game the system. In response, several weeks ago we moved to a computer algorithm to do it (kinda like a search engine). This looks at over a dozen different factors to come up with an overall score. Since almost none of these factors we know when the post is actually made, we give the post 200 points and then points for that post adjust over the next week or so (usually upwards). We will often tweak the how this computer algorithm works to prevent abuse, but like Google have learned that total transparency just doesn't work. Interestingly enough, we've had by far the least scoring complaints during this time period.
General rules of thumb for scoring points...
- Write posts that a human will actually want to read.
- Write posts that generate discussion.
- Will be heavily wieghting informative consumer content up soon to help build Localism.com
- Don't make lots of posts with no redeeming value for the sole purpose of earning points.
Now back to the Blog Dashboard...
The dashboard has become a point of very heated contention, because everybody likes to be there but only 20 stops are shown. You wouldn't believe how many emails we've gotten regarding it. We had some wacky algorithm to choose who got displayed that used a combination of ratings and comments to let the system attempt to choose who were the most active/popular/controversial bloggers to be highlighted. It only used posts in the last 30 days to choose these bloggers to provide some turn over and keep people active. In this latest update we changed it to only include posts in the last 15 days to get even more turnover and variety, and also changed the ordering so that is uses the average score of the blog posts.
By the way you can also click the By State link on the blog dashboard to see an extended list with 50 bloggers or to view the top 50 in each state.
On another note...
Automated scoring of photo uploads to Localism will go live soon, and everybody who's uploaded photo's previously will get your points then. There will be several additional ways to earn points in connection with building out Localism.com soon.
-Matt Heaton (ActiveRain CEO)
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Thanks for the update Matt, I knew this had to come up soon. This is about the 5th time in a row that the direction you seem to be taking parallels what Rich J and I are talking about. Nice job once again.
PS - can we get a spell-checker soon? :) TinyMCE has 2 of them.