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dynamic access control = reward participation = virtual economy


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timtak

Forum User
Newbie
Registered: 11/25/04
Posts: 3
excited
There are a few sites on the net that have "rewarded participation" by a dynamic access control system such that those that post *useful content* can read, or down load or access more.

Typical of such sites is
istockphoto.com
which is a site for sharing images. When a user uploads images, nothing much happens. But when another users accesses those image then the contributor is credited with points so that he or she can download the content uploaded by other users. This means that participation is rewarded and it works very well. It is, as it says, the fastest growing royalty free collection in the world, and taking on the giants, like ghetty images.

The makers of the istockphoto site said that they would only licence the database / CMS for about $10,000!

That is a lot of money way out of my league, but perhaps it gives an indication of the usefulness of these sort of rewarded participation sites.

Lots of us have blogs. We post. Some people read. We get some comments. But quite a lot of the time the blog site, or community does not really get off the ground and slows down when the owner gets past the initial buzz.

A lot of the time the articles posted to blogs are fun for the writer, and that is why so many blog diaries keep going. But it is rarer to find a site hat keeps posting useful content. Researching, writing, producing useful content, that people really want to see, takes time. If you do it on your own then you have to be really motivated. Some site use donations and advertising to provide an incentive. But this is not appropriate to all sites, and the link between contribution and reward is not direct.

There are however quite a lot of instances where content on sites is really useful. Sometimes people sell it by subscription (e.g. the term paper sites that I do not condone!). All the same subscriptions do not directly reward participation of the contributors in a direct way.

In my own field, English education, there are contents that I would really like to share. For instance tests and graded readers, both essential for language learning. Some lucky people are energetic enough to get these sort of sharing sites of the ground but a lot of us put some good content up on our site and then that is it. Other people do not join in. That is the way things often -- but not always -- work.

So...well if there were a system of dynamic access control in blog software so that when someone writes something (a research paper, a report, a test, a graded reader, a design) and and another member (after having read the intro) decides to read the rest, then the contributor gets points, so that he or she can, reciprocally, read the contributions of other contributors, then a site would be more likely to snowball into something bigger because the "points" awarded would create a virtual economy.

Another site that uses this system effectively is
proz.com
where those that make contributions to the site get extra posting priveldges via the browniz (c) and kudoz (c) point systems. I hope that by suggesting the concept of dynamic access control I am not infriginging their copyright or istock's copyright. I don't mean to copy istockphoto's points, or "kudoz" or "browniz" exactly, but the general idea of a sort of virtual money,...would be great, and produce blogs that really expand.

Well it is just an idea and I respect that this site for one, as many other open source sites, works very well without an enforced economy -- donations are voluntary. And I would make a real donation for this sort of function.

I was just about to use b2evolution when I saw geeklog. Urk. This is indeed the ultimate weblog system.

Tim
 Quote

tokyoahead

Anonymous
I do not think this would be very difficult to implement to be honest.

First of all, every article has hits, and so you can see directly which user is posting something useful or not. The only thing there might be that you have to exclude robots from the pages since they generate hits also.

You can design a group level system.

You can write a hack that changes the group of an article with each hit (0-10,11-25 etc) into a higher leve (group_1, group_2 etcl. So if a user creates an article that is read so-and-so often, he gets promoted (added ) to the next higher group and can also read higher leveled articles. this would be a hack placed in the function that is updating the hitcounter. The new article of a level-3 user would have always level 2 so that people below can read them.

in order eto make people thirsty for more you might have to change the permission theme in geeklog so that the intros of all articles are always shown but the "Read-More" link is displayed according to the access rights. This should not be a major act IMHO.

I am not sure how deep the plugin API goes to enable that, so I think you would have to hack all that.

All you have to do is to setup a working formula for this. and have content that fits to a system like this.

btw I just realoized that I made 200 posts... do I get a kiss from a nice girl now or something ? Very Happy
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timtak

Forum User
Newbie
Registered: 11/25/04
Posts: 3
Dear Tokyoahead,

Blimey, that was quick.

I can't pronounce php (well only the most minor of hacks) so this is not something that I could do.

Hmm, the more hits, the higher the group level. The higher the group level the higher level articles...

While this would also work as an incentive, this is a little different because it assumes that there are levels of articles, and that users reach levels of arcane-ness and get, if not a kiss from a nice girl, a greater level of penetration into the site.

But I could see this starting rather small with say 20 articles of my own, all of a similar level, and not appealing to everyone. Then if someone uploaded an article that I or someone else read, they would be entitled to read say 3 articles that are on the site. A three that they can choose, not the three in level one (since they might not be interested in the three in level one).

Would it be possible to make it that there are only two levels - "see nothing" and "see all".

A hit to users article bumps their level to the "see all" level.
But reading three articles drops their level to the "see nothing" level?

Or to avoid making an extra counter.... if there were 500 levels. But all articles can be read by anyone with level above level 2. When ones article is downloaded then one goes up 3 lelves. When one download's an article it goes down one level.

So someones article is read, they go up to level four. Then they download three articles and get back to level one, where they can't read again until someone reads their next article.

And if you ever get to 500 you stay there in nirhvana with lots of pretty girls and access to the whole site forever.

And yes, as you suggest, perhaps there might be articles in higher levels too, particularly long ones, for instance. This might be moderated.

But the main thing to be to be able increment group level with hits to that users articles by X, and to decrement group level with accesses to others articles by Y, and perhaps to set the nirhvana level (in the above example 500) when someone gets a key to the site.

I am not sure if I can afford it SO please do not spend time but would anyone quote for this sort of hack or plugin?

Tim

PS. Are you coming to Japan? I am in Japan. Have been for the past 14 years. I like it.
http://bulogu.com

 Quote

tokyoahead

Anonymous
The issue is that geeklog has no built-in feature to prevent/allow you to read x more random articles. The built-in features can put you into a group and therefore allow you to read anything that has been published for that group.

You _could_ write what you ask, but this would be a bit more of a change since you would have to record the data of which articles someone read already and how many he is allowed to read next.

You could only go around this by creating an unlimited number of groups and give each article a new one (group_000001) etc.
This might be a bit of a mess however, technically it seems possible however.

Or to avoid making an extra counter.... if there were 500 levels. But all articles can be read by anyone with level above level 2. When ones article is downloaded then one goes up 3 lelves. When one download's an article it goes down one level.


This can be done easier, however this means that you cannot read an article twice without loosing a level again...

If you stick with the option to lift people to another level, you can decide yourself how many articles it needs to be promoted a level. In the next level there can be by definition more or less articles depending on the amount of posting you need to to advance further. This will create a pyramid in which you can read more and more or less and less aditional levels depending on how you want it.

the length of an article might not be too good to judge since quality is not alwas quantity.

The issue of quoting on this highly depends on the question on how to proceed with updates of the main software. Since you would have to hack your way into this, you would loose the functionality with every update that is released.

PS.: I lived in Tokyo for only two years, beeing in Austria now and moving to HongKong in about 6-8 months
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Status: offline

timtak

Forum User
Newbie
Registered: 11/25/04
Posts: 3
Thanks again,

Hmmm... it would not be essential that users could read the article agian. They could be prompted to download it.

This all sounds rather complicated. I will wait until someone on high decides this is a good idea, somewhere.

I agree that length is not always the judge, nor even is someone having downloaded an article. I think the download counter should be combined with the equivalent of "karma" (an greymatter blog function) or the yahoo auction post auction trust/evaluation system, so that if someone clicked a link and it turned out to be rubbish they could vote to decrease the author's point reward (to 1 or 2) and if it is great they could vote to increase it to 4 or 5.

Also for the time being, I am afraid, I think that I going to use the simpler b2evolution as my blog since it is easier for a techno-challenged person like myself. That does not mean that I am not in awe of geeklog, because I am. But merely I think I will be using something simpler, more at my level. I am told that this "rewarded participation" function could not be achieved without hacking the main source over their either.

Too bad...

I hope you are enjoying Hong Kong.

Tim
in Japan
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tokyoahead

Anonymous
If you follow the way I proposed I guess you could do it quite easily without spending any money.

Also, there is a rating plunging for Geeklog AFAIK.
So you could use the rating to award people to get into a higher level also.
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timtak

Anonymous
Thanks but there is no way that my particular use would work with a heirarchy of files. The user has to be given free choice, like in the case of istockphoto.com. Imagine if you got points to go up to the next level but there were photos of busses when you needed photos of icecream.

Tim
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