Hey all,
as most of us now had some time to get acquainted with the new Merit-System, I thought it would be a good time to try and utilizes this great new forum feature.
To be more specific: Utilize it in Signature Campaigns.
But why in Signature Campaigns?
My reasoning here is the following: Merits mainly were introduced to reduce spam.
Signature Campaigns are responsible for a lot of spam, even if many of them try to encourage their participants to produce 'quality posts'.
Obviously, the majority of those posts aren't, else most of them would get merited. The threshold for a post to qualify as a 'quality post' in most Signature Campaigns
is extremely low hence there is no incentive to make really good posts.
The main problem here is, that if a member has a certain level and is 'stuck' there due to the Activity-rule, there is almost no reason for this member to create valuable posts as he can't get more stakes.
This is neither good for the forum, nor for the campaign itself as advertisement done by members who really post quality is also more valuable than by those who just 'get by'.
I already saw some hesitant suggestions to make Signature Campaigns solely based on Merit. While at a first glance this sounds feasible, I think that kind of change wouldn't work mainly
due to the fact that the higher the Rank, the better the ad space, so to speak (better signature).
That's why I attempted to find an
easy system that allows for
Rank and Merit to be regarded
in Signature Campaigns when it comes to the calculation of stakes.
And because I like visually pleasing things, I made it a bit more colorful
Alternate layoutThis might look more complicated than it is. As most Bounty Managers already use Spreadsheets, it's really easy to use prepared formulas like the following (first example).
It needs to have some more levels/nested conditions though, but I didn't want to make the example too complicated:
=IF(C2>B3;D3+(C2-B3)/(B4-B3)*((D4-D3)/4);D2+(C2-B2)/(B3-B2)*(D3-D2)/2)This is just an approach and an attempt to get the Merit-System transfered to Signature Campaigns because I think that this would really benefit the forum as it creates the needed incentive to even
make good posts if you can't rank up due to missing Activity. With the Merit now factored in, members get more stakes even if they stay the same Rank but they never get that much more Stakes then a member with a higher Rank
(
IF that member also stays active and creates value).
A more sophisticated way could be to count the earned Merit (last 120 days) based on the forum stats. There are also many other variations (Merit/Rank/Activity), but that's something for another thread.
This took more time than I thought and now it's getting late here. I hope that I didn't make any grave mistakes
I'm really curious what you think, would you take a different approach to introduce Merit in Signature Campaigns? Hopefully, there will be some Bounty Campaigns that will include Merit in their Stake-distribution.
Cheers!