modify the point system

Question

I want to implement a new point system where you gain one point for every word in the answer and lose one point for every word in the question. I feel like this would encourage longer answers. Is there any way I could go about implementing this?

Comments

Length and brevity aren't indicators of good answers. Sometimes a simple 'yes' or 'no' - with minimal supporting info - is appropriate.

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I see your point. However, on my website some users are asking really long questions, and I feel asking longer questions should cost more points than asking short ones. Likewise, having a long answer takes a lot of effort and the user should be rewarded.

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But often, questions need to be long to explain what they are asking...

Well anyway in theory this is possible, you'd need to set all the regular points to zero, except "ask" and "answer" set to 1. Then in the back end code there should be some functions where points are calculated, you'd need to modify it to multiply the point by the number of words in the answer. gidgreen (the developer) can probably answer this one better...

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I suggest you try to educate users with 'how best to...' suggestions rather than load the points for/against.

It'll never be perfect, and it's better to have natural questions and answers rather than stuff structured for points advantage - besides, who really gives a **** about the points anyway?

Answer 1

It's an interesting question, but would require quite a fair amount of development to make it work. You could add new columns to qa_userpoints, and keep those columns updated whenever a question or answer was created, edited, hidden or deleted. All the relevant functions are in qa-app-post-create.php and qa-app-post-update.php. You would then need to make the appropriate modifications to the query in qa_db_points_update_ifuser(...) in qa-db-points.php.