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I'm getting the following error:
Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.. Ticket: 4733934. Server: Web24
Been like this for a while now
Don't know if this message will go thru since I'm not getting the forum anymore (page loads but no threads)
[EDIT]
Seems to be server bound
Everything is fine on web21
[/EDIT]
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Same as you, web24 is down like a card shark in a dock side game with a knife in his gut.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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Thanks for reporting.
All servers are good now.
Sincerely,
Elina
Life is great!!!
Enjoy every moment of it! 
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The majority of messages that go against an article during moderation are statements or things that needs to be improved upon.
At present the default message type is Question, can this be changed to Suggestion?
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The recent changes to reputation points piqued my interest and I starting looking into the things we get points for.
I'm a little confused.
My understanding of gamification is that it's a bit like taxes and incentives. You use it to promote the kind of activity you want to see in your community.
That being the case, the awarding of points for different activities gives us an insight into the kind of community that the organisers would like to create.
Which is why I'm really confused about what it is that CodeProject wants to be.
For example, here are a few recent events from my log....
Signing In - 1 point. (nothing wrong there, it's good to promote regular use)
Post Message - 1 point. (again, good, reward people who contribute)
Source Code from Article Downloaded - 1 point (Huh! 1 point, for a download, oookaaay)
Message Upvoted - 24 points (this is taking the piss). I write a moderately witty post and I get multiple awards of 24 points. How can this possibly be 24 times better than providing source code that someone goes to the trouble of downloading?
Note, I'm not complaining about the system. Frankly if there was no reputation system at all on CodeProject it wouldn't make one iota of difference to me.
I'm interested in Gamification, and CodeProject is an interesting case of it.
I'm just trying to understand why the system is gamed the way it is. I'm sure a lot of thought goes into the kind of site CodeProject should be, and how to game the points system to nudge things in that direction.
-Richard
Hit any user to continue.
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I think the downloads should be weighted too.
But then if you give an answer, you can get multiple 40 points for the answer, that seems fair.
I think the main problem is the downloads were too heavily scored.
Perhaps the first 50 should be at a higher rate, the next 50 at a lower rate etc until after say 300 downloads they fall to 1 point each.
------------------------------------
I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave
CCC Link[ ^]
Trolls[ ^]
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Richard A. Dalton wrote: Message Upvoted - 24 points (this is taking the piss). I write a moderately witty post and I get multiple awards of 24 points. How can this possibly be 24 times better than providing source code that someone goes to the trouble of downloading?
Its not. But that is exactly why there are categories like Author, Debator etc.
Debator points are good to earn and make you feel part of the site.
However, they may or may not be contributing to helping others compared to downloading source code etc.
Download points go into the Author category.
I don't think I'm able to convey what I mean here completely, but I hope you get a general idea.
Too much of heaven can bring you underground
Heaven can always turn around
Too much of heaven, our life is all hell bound
Heaven, the kill that makes no sound
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I think you brought up some interesting points. These points have been debated in the past to some extent but they are good points none the less. +5
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Just along for the ride.
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Abhinav[^], has hit the nail on the head with regards to the flaw in your analysis.
Richard A. Dalton wrote: Message Upvoted - 24 points
These points only go in the debator category, so they only increase your 'standing' in The Lounge and the other general forums. This enhances the 'self-moderating' ethos of the site. I, for example, am platinum in Debator, indicating I have a fair understanding of what goes down well and what doesn't in the Lounge. I can therefore use my voting weight to encourage the well recieved posts, or discourage the No-no's. A good example is non-Western newbies posting bad jokes in the Lounge, most only ever make that mistake once, if there was no rating system, we would have to tell the newbie direct that his joke was sh*t and....well as you can imagine, he will probably be put off for life.
If you look at my Authority rep though, I'm paper-status or something low-ranked, so if I voted on your article, my vote will be weighted very lightly despite having a reasonably high overall Rep. Therefore, a platinum member can look at your article, decide my vote was unfair, and more than compensate for it in the process.
You have to remember the overall rep is not used to weight your contribution, only the category rep relevant to the site feature you are acting in. The rep system is almost perfect as it is, and does serve a purpose.
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The reputation system was mostly designed to award members for participation, and not so much as a driver of any particular behaviour, though this is certainly baked into it as well.
A couple of examples might make things clearer.
An author posts an article. That's awesome and they get 100 times the number of points that someone posting a message in the lounge would get (the base currency). The value of their article, however, isn't 100 points. The value completely depends on how the community accepts the article. The 100 points is merely a down-payment, so to speak, and as members vote for the article, download the zips, and bookmark it, more and more points accumulate providing the author with the true reward for an article. The weighting system kicks in heavily here and is designed specifically to counter sock puppets while also recognising the value of an experienced vote.
A different example is that of posting a witty message in the lounge. A message is posted, it gets its single point, and then members love it, hate it, or ignore it, and it achieves votes and bookmarks that provide an indication of the communities reaction. Members can accrue a large number of points for being active, interesting, or even just entertaining in the community, and can almost as quickly lose those points for being anti-social.
In both examples the system is designed to continue rewarding members for activity long after they have carried out an action. This isn't a system designed to guide you through a maze like a rat. This is a system designed to reward the members because we, as site organisers, want to recognise the contributions, in all ways, that members make.
For an author posting an article they will achieve Author points as their contributions are awarded. A small number initially, but then over time they gain the true value with points awarded from all members who are helped by the author. Similarly for those answering questions: they get Authority points. Those posting in the Lounge get Debator points which recognise their contribution to the community but do not, in practice, provide them much in the way of access to special functionality or rights.
The Debator points were a fundamental design of the system because we have many, many members who rarely answer a question, or have never posted an article or a tip, but who nevertheless may be in the core of the community. They provide great conversation, insights, help to others in general ways, police the forums and report malicious activity or just nudge members back on track. Even if points gained don't provide as many practical benefits as, say, an author, they are important and should be recognised.
There are definitely a few apparant inconsistencies within the system that could be debated forever (and probably will) but obviously no system is perfect. We only weight voting (opinion) actions and not usage actions like downloads or bookmarks. We value a download as 1 point and a bookmark as 5 points, partly because our feeling, and member behaviour, seemed to suggest a download was done "just to see" while a bookmark implied a member valued the item enough to revisit. We also don't reward views - partly because we don't have fractions of a point, but mostly because identifying a real view from a spider or bot is near impossible to do with accuracy.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Thanks. Good Reply.
-Richard
Hit any user to continue.
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Although that explains a lot, it doesn't justify why a message vote is 24 but a download is 1. At the very least, a download should be 2 or 5 (same as a bookmark). Also, shouldn't a vote in a programming forum be weighted more (say 2) than in the Lounge? It would allow those who post technical suggestions in those forums to fare better than those who just use the Lounge for idle chatter.
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The vote is weighted by the reputation of the voter, not by the location. That's why somebody like JSOP has more influence in his votin than somebody who joined yesterday.
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I understand that, but a Lounge vote from JSOP (24) shouldn't weigh that much more than a bookmark or download vote from a newbie. I'm not for increasing those votes per se, but maybe the non-technical votes (Lounge, Soapbox, etc.) need to be taken down a bit.
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Part of it's a matter of numbers. Downloads are set to only 1 point to keep them from totally overwhelming everything else. Look at Chris's[^] article list. On average, only a few dozen votes/article and thousands of downloads. Bookmarks might deserve a higher weight since they only appear to occur about as often as votes (probably because most people are bookmarking in their browser not CP; and aren't counted as a result).
3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18
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Hmmm, the numbers explanation makes sense. I guess we need to teach people how to BM within CP. Maybe we need to weight everything (views + downloads + bookmarks). A lot of articles may not have downloads and are succint enough to help without having to be bookmarked. Food for thought, I guess.
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote: Although that explains a lot, it doesn't justify why a message vote is 24 but a
download is 1. At the very least, a download should be 2 or 5 (same as a
bookmark).
It was that way initially, but the resulting top-scorer list was not considered ideal and it seemingly gave an advantage to authors with very popular articles. So the download points were tweaked until the resulting rep scores list were in sync with the popular expectation of what the top ranked guys should look like. And in my opinion, it was not a bad idea.
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Then set a limit on the number of points each article can garner, or make it logarithmic (ideally). After all, an article that keeps on helping should keep on amassing and the top CP authors have earned it. Not sure I care if you, CG, or any of the others are ten times ahead of me or a thousand. 
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote: Not sure I care if you, CG, or any of the others are ten times ahead of me or a
thousand.
You probably don't. But a new author who considers himself to be way smarter than CG or myself, may believe that he's contributing far more to the site that either of us but that we are way too ahead of him to even give him a remote chance of catching up.
To work around that, I'd think it's a good idea to have an all-time score as well as a last 12 months score, with the default being the last 12 months score.
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That idea would work nicely too to see who's improving and who's falling.
If someone thinks he's better than the top ten, we need to draw them out and challenge them to a duel, or put their names in a wall where they can be publically mocked (or rocked if they win).
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Could be useful with the rise of G+ to get a new profile field for G+ accounts.
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I'd hold off until it's known if G+ is going to survive any longer than any one of the other 300 betas that Google killed off over the last year.
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Henry Minute
Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain
Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
“I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus!
When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.
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Henry Minute wrote: +1
Univoter, eh?
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." (DNA)
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Just had a thought about reputation wearing off ( with a similar system to tennis ATP ranking, for instance) with time. This would:
- keep the reputation more "up-to-date", e.g. it is not because I have contributed ten articles ten years ago in VB6 that I am still "reputable" enough to answer ASP.NET questions. I take my own case as an example: I have not touched a line of code since 2007 and still profit from the reputation I gained answering questions in the C++ forum more than 8 years ago.
- give newcomers with good competences a hope to reach the "gods circle" of top posters/members, since the top scores would not be so high as today. It is nowadays impossible to outscore them, or even to become slightly visible...
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