Several people have asked me for a list of how points are awarded since we’ve moved over to the new site, and it’s been a jumble really as we’ve been trying to change the defaults and find the right balance.
Sean and I sat down yesterday and worked through the point system on the new site and tweaked it again, and I think it is finally ready for public consumption. 
As always, we want to reward people for asking and answering IT questions, since that is the core of the site, but we want people to be rewarded for other things that help the site too, like coming back every day and for appropriately flagging bad content. Solutions (vintage best answers) are still the biggest way to earn points, but we’re going to give a very small amount of points for some other things as well. Here’s the list of ways to earn points:
- Coming back every day
- Creating and replying to topics
- Flagging a post (if it is confirmed as appropriate)
- Getting spice from others
- Having your answer marked as the solution to a question
- Reading the site (by amount of posts and by time spent)
- Spicing up someone else
Obviously some of these are weighted very differently… but the overall idea is if you are doing something good for the site, you will get points… even people who don’t feel comfortable participating a lot will get some points. If you are really active and digging in and answering people’s questions, you will just get more points.
I realize this is a departure from the way that it used to be, and we may have to tweak things further if the points seem to get out of balance… totally open to that, so if you start seeing things like that, let me know.
We are planning on adjusting spice levels at some point as well, as we were already planning on the vintage site, but now taking new point trends into account.
We don’t yet have a way to award points for surveys or to grant manual points for different things that we used to give points for (like writing a Dear SpiceRex or submitting an Uh-Oh article), but if you want to do those things before we have the capability, you can just keep track and cash in later.
Anyway, just an update about where we are at this time, but if you have questions or concerns, hit me up below.
Z
