Suggestion: Possibility to give points to user

Question

It would be great if it is possible to give points to an user, given by an admin, for any reason, or by a plugin, for example, for achieving something. This is some kind like StackOverflow, where if an user gets a badge, it also gets points (reputation in StackOverflow).

 

What do you think?

Comments

+1 from me. Would be great if points can be removed to for contests.

Answer 1

Anyone? Is this ever gonna be implemented or not? Just want an answer. :)

Comments

There is already Points-based reputation system. why dont you use that?

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Yes, and I want to use that reputation system. What I'm saying is that it would be nice if the admin could manualy give x points to the user, and maybe specify a description. And would be great too if plugins could have that ability too. :)

Answer 2

The problem is, I think, that like tags, the points need to be recalculatable on the stats page.  You can't have both at the same time - either you allow points to be awarded arbitrarily and forget about the ability to recalculate them (say when you decide that 100 points for an up vote wasn't really a good idea), or you maintain the ability to change the points scheme on demand and give up the idea of arbitrary point awarding.

I guess the best solution would be to have hooks in all the rebuild functions, so plugins could access their own database tables and modify the rebuild results as they like.

Comments

That gave me a great idea. A simple event throwing would result, I think, but for that gidgreen would have to put that on the official release, so it would be possible for plugin creators to hook the points system, as you said. :)

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I think this would be doable if Gideon made a small change in the core that factored in points from a special table. Then you could have plugins that added things to that table for whatever reasons and they would be counted in points recalculations.

Answer 3

Someone asked me to write a plugin for an IRC (Internet Relayed Chat) bot that would give points to people who stay on IRC, in order to thank them to be there.

Unfortunatly, the 'points' column of the database is refreshed (by the way: this kind of redundance is bad, you should use a dedicated cache system (such as memcached) or a table dedicated to cache), so my changes would be ignored. I think you could add another column (called 'extrapoints'?) that would allow third party systems (or Q2A plugins) to add or remove points for other reasons.

Regards