Our moderators/admins/users are doing great job by sharing knowledge with each other, they do correct/appreciate us in posts.
This poll is to encourage emerging users to go in a better direction, kindly do give your thoughts on same.
1- Giving them a reward/appreciation if they are continuously giving good answers
2- Encourage them more by sending them PM that they are doing well or they can try more to give good solutions.
3- By creating a new option named "Moderator/admin's like" which can let user know how he is doing good in providing solutions.
4- Make a �STAR of the MONTH award� etc for monthly basis b/w all users on their performances on handling/answering/helping/learning/advising users.
5- The current "Thank You" system is working fine.
NOTE: This may be helpful for people who are learning and want to know where they are currently and what kind of improvements they can made to them to help and learn to/from people.
Being a volunteer, Its not a good idea to differentiate members within our community, by giving award/reward etc, sometimes there will many good answers contributed to a single thread by more than 1 member, same might repeat in some other threads too, in such cases how you will decide who is contributed highest or least, in some cases there will be many posts by single user which is similar to other answers already given but not exactly, that is his/her contribution, he/she will not see whether answer is better than already given or not, so what is to be done in such cases ?
Its just my personal opinion that we are (our forum) good enough already, we have good mutual understanding, and at the same time each of us will not get same amount of time to contribute to the forum, but still there are many people giving their time to help others, so if we make any such system which some other forums already have, ( like you are Hero 100+ posts this week , some other fellow is Zero did not logged in this week ), there will be a chance of loosing volunteer's interest towards the forum.
Thank you for your view first of all. It is completly depend on person how it looks a thing like a famous quote:
My opinion is simple it is for encourge people not to discorage, if one person got hero it doesn't mean others are zero or they are not good. It means we are just saying thanks to them as a forum as a group which I believe is not to make a differance between people. We may or may not have this, but encouraging people will help them as well as us too. Also it is very important for all of us to know where we reside now I mean in techincal knowledge specially people who have less experience, so that we can learn from seniors/all and correct/fine tune ourselves too.
Given the already existing mechanics...
Why not just press Thanks a bit more often?
That is, if the answer/solution is good, helps, or gives indication to a solution the questioneer can work out himself, brings in another approach, or whatever the thread its own 'requirement' for 'justification' is...
By giving "rewards", i would already know that Don wins each and every time, since his posts usualy excel any other other answer given in the regarding threads.
While i would agree that answers/solutions of such quality should be rewarded, imho anything else than a 'thanks' might become dis-encouraging over time because of 'pressure' since not everyone can write in such matters and provide so many indepth knowledge by heart has Don, Aia, Scrutnizer, Neo, Wise, Rudic, Akshay, WhobblerXL, Ravinder, and few others i currently dont recall.
Challenge question, just for the discussion, and who is going to 'judge' all those posts, compare their value for/to the thread opener (how do you know how good the answers were for another person??), compare their quality versus all the other answers given?
And who is giving advice in how to increase the quality of the posts, to each member, without giving the 'feeling' one is back at school, wether one wants or not?
My 2 cents to this nice idea
EDIT:
Just saying this suggestion is time-intense, needs a volunteer who is capable, has the time, and is willing to do it.
The 'thanks' button is good because it comes from users appreciation, not a judgement. The solutions here are not about which one is 'the best', but about which one solves the OP's problem. There can be many different solutions to non specific issues, and they all represent a different understanding of those issues.
I've only been here a short fime and I've learned a lot and had some fun in the process. That's reward enough. It sure beats crossword puzzles.
P.S. Maybe there should be a "None of the above" option in the poll?
Just a bit of background. These forums used to have a star of the month system with an election in place some years ago and a hall of fame page and bits that could be awarded. In the end, we did not feel it worked well enough and this system was abolished in favor of the simple thanks button..
The problem is how do you award pure amateurs like me who have no professional background in coding but give help within their limits. The THANKS button is excellent and does boost one's ego.
I started learning shell scripting here on this site in January 2013 and so far I have only scratched the surface, but boy have I done some bizarre things with shell scripting and posted them on here.
I love _banging_the_metal_, (an AMIGA turm of phrase), and have been thanked by my professional peers on here for some things I have done and to me that is thanks enough...
There are so many active overlapping communities, one wonders if it would be overwhelming to have all their traffic. I get email from DaniWeb, AIX/IBM forums, shellscript forums, solaris forums. I see posts here mirrored on other forums. Maybe we could have a question/answer interchange?
Many posts get no answer, as we are just too tired of people who want us to do their work for them, who cannot use google, cannot read their own docs. Some are stuck in the wrong job. Their answer is "It's not that simple."
I would agree that the system in place works well. There is the option to gift bits and while there is no trade-able value, the wonderful feeling one gets when receiving a gift is enough. Perhaps we could make that process more available, perhaps a Thanks+GiftBits or a Thanks+PM button, but then it has to be used properly rather than just being too easy and meaningless.
I'm not sure what I'm arguing for now, but perhaps there needs to be some limit on using them per user per week to give them proper kudos value.
As to the earlier quote regarding optimism versus pessimism:-
.... one could argue that someone has bought a cup that is too large.
I think the current "Thank you" system works well amongst pros but is perhaps not easily seen by newcomers and novices.
I recently was involved in a thread where the OP spent half of his replies to me thanking me until I said not to do that, just press the Thanks button.
Perhaps the Thanks button should be more prominent (eg, a different color, flashing or something). There is plenty of instructional text on the forum about what NOT to do but I can't find much about issuing thanks when a reply is really useful.
Thanks aren't mentioned in the forum rules, a search of the general forum for Thanks yields no search result, and searching FAQ's for Thanks yields no search result.
How does a newcomer find out that the polite thing to do is to press Thanks when he/she finds the information really useful? Have I missed something?
A lot of sessions are like teaching "how to write a requirement 101". Diagnosing the asker's communication difficulty is the first challenge. It can be very off-putting, especially if they are mired in brand-speak. We would get better answers from better questions!
Pushed the thanks button on Ravinder's post, since it got this nice thread going. In general, think there should be more thank you's for good first posts.
