Today is a great day to get answers to obscure and silly testing questions in the forum. Everyone probably looking for stuff to post on haha
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Anything that gets more Bruce goodness back in my life. I’ve missed you friend!
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To be honest, it still isn’t on point. I can see the fix has been rolled out and the point system has been updated and Mirza is on top!
BUT according to your scoring chart, it still does NOT match 
Since Mirza has 1.9k received and 6.4k given and each should be 1 point, he should be at 8.3K on the leaderboard not even taking into account the other scorings.
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Strap on everyone, we’re digging deep into the business logic behind this! 
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A new feature on a forum full of testers? Did anyone expect anything else? It’s getting shredded to bits 
[EDIT] Like an subscribe this post for more smart arse comments!
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I mean, let’s all be honest here, does anything ever work 100%? 
I’ve spent my entire career advocating for high-quality products and services. If things were 100% our careers would be in a very difficult place.
I like that we can still discover problems with the Contribution Leaderboard. I like it because it’s got us chatting and I also like it because it highlights that nothing is 100%.
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this.
I always very much enjoy what you have to share, @undevelopedbruce. This is a zero-pressure message, more just a reflection of my appreciation for the experiences, questions and thoughts that you share on here.
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2 days ago my contributions were at 404 (coz I made a geeky joke out of it) and today they’re 361… am I doing the contributions wrong?
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Aha, the Discourse team have helped me understand why.
The plugin has a field called scorable categories. And I added all the recently created categories and some older categories that are still in use. I didn’t include those that are no longer in use – when of course I should’ve done. That’ll be why the scores don’t match as it’s not pulled the data from all the categories that have ever existed.
I’ve now updated scorable categories so it’ll pick up all categories regardless of whether they are active or not. I’ve asked the Discourse team to run the backfill job again to see if that resolves the issue.
Let’s find out. 
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I think it did work XD
Imho, likes given should still not count though! I like to many posts for that XD
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Okay, I’ll just lay it out very honestly, because it’s eating away at me: I hate the contribution leaderboard.
I hope and pray that it’s a naming problem. Watching myself fall in “contribution” rank because of the quantity and not quality of my responses is demotivating. I also don’t want to think of myself as an entry in a leaderboard - my value here is as a person, with my personality and skills and knowledge, not how many likes I get, and to be measured as such feels dehumanising to me. I don’t want to be measured, I want to help.
So far this month I’ve written 1219 words in 7 replies on the Club, and tens of thousands over many years, but the word count isn’t considered contribution.
I also try to provide well thought out, researched information, solid follow ups, important clarifications, links to sources and resources. I spend a lot of time researching, rereading, cleaning language, self-editing, and sometimes not posting a whole essay because I think it’s what’s best. The quality of my responses isn’t considered contribution.
I try to be patient, encouraging and humorous where I can. I edit my posts to reflect inclusivity and remove things that might be too aggressive, even when my depression or anxiety are bad or I’m fighting with my social difficulties. The effort or tone of my responses isn’t considered contribution.
I’ve contributed to the MoT club almost exclusively for many, many years, at the expense of other communities, slack, discord or my own blog. If you wanna read stuff I write you come here. My loyalty isn’t considered contribution.
I encourage other people to use MoT, and tell people how useful it is, how kind people here are. My cheerleading isn’t considered contribution.
Is my contribution not valid? Not valued? It literally doesn’t count, I’ll have to rely on figuratively.
We talk a lot in this community about metrics that are dangerously collected and used and how employees can game a system (usually once a fortnight on rotation with the other repeating topics), and it’s really odd to me that we repeat the same concept here. I take pride in what I write, and now I’m getting graded - it’s as if the point of contributing is being devalued in favour of the act of contributing.
What’s the plan? If the idea is that we’ll fight over placings, then I don’t see how that builds a community. Are we supposed to compete or help each other? Do we battle for likes? Wage war over first replies to boost exposure? If we’re trying for top spot we definitely need to stop issuing likes to people, we’re feeding their score. Should we say things that are important, or is it important that we say things? If the points and ranking don’t matter then I don’t understand why we’re measuring, and if they do matter…
From the desk of the 21st most valued contributor ever!
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Someone said it! 
I agree the ‘gamifying’ of contributions doesn’t fill me with any joy either. If the game is to post and like stuff, then yes, people may do that - but the quality is irrelevant as quality is not part of the game.
That isn’t my main issue though. Contribution points have been all backdated for users, and when I saw this, it immediately disengaged me.
I joined this forum to speak to people in my industry, and to learn and share. I’ve only been contributing to this forum on and off for about a year, and now I see a users with over 3k ‘contribution’ points… I’m just like 
- contribution points are essentially a measure of time the user has been posting and liking stuff, which will always be ‘longer’ than me. Unless those members stop contributing, I’ll never catch up and have zero interest in doing so… as it has no value.
Even if I was number 1, all it means is that I’ve posted and liked more than anyone else - which doesn’t mean anything.
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Exactly why I said “giving a like” should not matter for the scoreboard.
Hence if people do a good post, people will like that and you’ll get points for that… just like stack overflow.
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I did not read the full thread and do not know if parts of my comments were already covered.
My 2 cents:
Scrap the whole thing.
People should focus on meaningful interaction, not on points.
I have seen pointifications doing more damage than than they help.
IMO it is a waste of effort. Implementation, maintenance, discussions …
People will have meaningful interactions without it when they want to.
At the very least hide it for the public and just use it internally to track how divers are the contributions by this rule set.
When you want the contributions to be more divers then pleas do not show so explicit how long they are still not that diverse.
It might demotivate others to see always the same group on the top (5-10).
And people which have less time will never have a chance to get next to the people with more time.
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I agree here on everything.
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Yes, and maybe re-work the badge system to have more meaningful badges and not “like X posts”
But more like Create a Topic that has 20 likes, because that will be a meaningful post.
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I feel like I’ve created a better habit this week …logging in, interacting with posts and starting conversations. I put “556” points down for my points last week, but didn’t note down what it related to e.g. daily, weekly… woops! Oh well. I’ve put a note in my calendar for when I get back from hols to check out the club 
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Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and for starting this conversation, @kinofrost.
And thanks for your follow-ups, @whitenoise, @kristof, @sebastian_solidwork and @melissafisher.
Chris, it’s super clear that your posts are well thought out and considered. And no doubt the community values your replies. Or at the very least they have your view on a particular topic that they can take away and do what they like with - even if someone doesn’t reply directly to tell you so. I reflect that this is such a challenge with online forums where folks write detailed & considered posts & replies and might not receive written feedback.
I’m gonna ask some questions at the end of this post as I’d love to learn more from you. Before I do that, let me share some context about why we switched on the leaderboard. I hope this helps.
We switched on the leaderboard as one of our recent initiatives to encourage more people to get involved on The Club – to spend more time here, start conversations, help each other out, build connections and learn. And in the process, if it helped people build an actual habit to get more involved then this is amazing news.
Recent data suggested that things had gone quieter on The Club. We have other initiatives in progress too, such as 30 Days of Career Growth coming soon in June. Plus the 5in5 initiative. And we’re slowly but surely creating new Club posts related to articles on the MoT platform to encourage even more discussions. And replies are a great way to celebrate the author of such articles.
Powering The Club is a service called Discourse, and it offers a gamification plugin. It was very straightforward to switch on. At Ministry of Testing we always have in mind to help folks find ways to get involved in the community in a way that works for them. We recently launched the Contribution page to help spark ideas.
Yet we think there’s a missing piece, a way for folks to receive even more types of rewards for their efforts. Badges, points and the like could all be part of that. And it’s been on our backlog to build profile pages for people to celebrate what they are up to with the testing community (not just the MoT community). However, that’s some time off.
Switching on the Discourse gamification plug-in seemed like a simple way to experiment with some sort of points system. We made assumptions that some folks would enjoy using it and that others wouldn’t. So we took a bit of risk by switching it on. I’m glad we did and have received so much helpful feedback about it. I reflect that if we didn’t switch it on then we wouldn’t have learnt this now – or at least deferred what happens when points are presented back to a community. As far as experiments go, it’s been a success.
I’ll be straight up here. I didn’t expect the leaderboard to be taken as seriously as it has been. I imagined it would be a lighthearted way for folks to “see where they are at over a period of time” and use it to motivate themselves in a way that works for them. I’d also expect a community to use a tool like a leaderboard to support each other and use it as an opportunity to help each other out, not as a way to compete with each other. I’m glad we’ve received useful feedback on the pitfalls of switching on a points-based system with a community. I understand why it makes people feel uncomfortable.
So here are the questions I mentioned I’d get to:
To everyone who is uncomfortable with the leaderboard: I’m super curious to know, what things help motivate you already to contribute to the MoT Community? And what things that don’t exist do you think would help? Is there any form of metric or data point that would help you? How might we build something that acknowledges that any form of points-based system can be gamed in some way? How can we be sensitive and inclusive to folks who are uncomfortable with points-based systems?
It’ll be cool if we could build this feedback into whatever more we do to help folks get involved with the community in a way that works for them.
This is a long post from me so I’ll finish by sharing this: As a community member, focus on doing what you do. That’s all that matters. There’s no judgement here, just appreciation for the many things you have to share.
Thanks again for all your feedback.
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As a side note, perhaps it helps if I share how I’ve been using the leaderboard since we turned it on.
Whenever I look at the leaderboard I first switch it to “Today” to get a quick sense of who is about. Then I switch to “Week” and then “Month”. It gives me a sense of who is “around”. It also reminds me to connect with people I haven’t connected with for a while. I then just switch away from the leaderboard and back to the Everything Latest view and get involved there, as that’s where it all matters.
Maybe we could put in a feature request to make those filters available within the URL instead of within the app so it’s easier to bookmark a preferred view – instead of having to see “All Time” first and then switch to another view. An alternative feature request would be to allow admins to select the default view. And we could set that to either “Day” or “Week”.
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