Reputation for members?

[bio_informatics]

Hi Members,

I've been (constantly) using seqanswers and many other forums from last many months.
I've found one thing missing from this forum is some batch/badge, or reputation kind of thing.
Something like: Sequencing guru, poster of the month, bashhelper, and many others.

I'm not sure if this is something that can be put up. Also, not sure if the developers and supporters would have financial/work force support for what I mentioned above.

I thought mentioning this point could give a new look to members and forum as well.

Sorry if this is not worth discussing or too naive.

Many thanks.

[Joann]

For any of your research presentations, especially in written form, such as papers, dissertations, and grant applications there are various style guides to enable formal citation of a blog post. See for example the MLA format for electronic sources cited under the section "blog post"

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08/

If you want to use a print citation for the SEQanswers website in general, you can use

SEQanswers: An open access community for collaboratively decoding genomes

Bioinformatics (2012) doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bts128

(formatted in the style of your bibliography)

[GenoMax]

vBulletin has a user "reputation" system. SeqAnswers.com runs on vBulletin.

I suppose it is up to the forum owner (ECO) to consider if it can be activated on SeqAnswers.

[SNPsaurus]

If there was going to be some sort of reputation metric, then I propose measuring everyone in units of "milli-Bushnells".

[Richard Finney]

I think google page rank is a pretty good arbiter of a decent post or thread.

I dont think Seqanswers should be like slashdot/facebook/hackernews/stackexchange.

There's plenty of other places to do that karma thing.

[bio_informatics]

@Joann - I meant to ask in-forum points.

Thank you all for your valuable points.

I believe that (introducing points) might crowd in more members.
Also, some sort of tagging would be of great help. So member can know reply is directed to him/her. I know user/member gets mail(s).

Just my 2 cents.

I'm a newbie and each of the above reply is new information to me.

[Joann]

Long ago and far away there was at least one other discussion thread along these lines, and I believe even ECO spoke. My suggestions above are for alternatives that could be pursued currently by those who claim benefit from the abundant expertise available here (to the extent that a citation format is appropriate.)

[westerman]

If there was going to be some sort of reputation metric, then I propose measuring everyone in units of "milli-Bushnells".

Yeah. I think I may be a 1 milli-Bushnell. 2 on a good day.

[ECO]

I could totally turn on the reputation and thread rating systems...I had avoided that because I wanted to avoid the clutter...and mostly think that interweb-points are overrated and often encourage the wrong things...

But if people want to experiment with it, I would be happy to turn it on...

[nucacidhunter]

I think encouraging members to acknowledge SEQanswers and most useful contributing members to a particular thread in acknowledgment section of a publication that has benefitted from forum would be good.

[Brian Bushnell]

I think encouraging members to acknowledge SEQanswers and most useful contributing members to a particular thread in acknowledgment section of a publication that has benefited from forum would be good.

I agree; that sounds better to me than a rating system. As ECO said, rating systems that I have seen do not always work as intended and often have negative consequences for the community; I would hate to see that happen here.

However, a private rating system - such that anyone can give ratings, but only the user can view their own ratings - might be sort of interesting.

[bio_informatics]

I second to "private rating system"

[Melissa]

Agree with Richard Finney. It's not like I can put the ratings in my CV. I'm guessing most members are more interested in getting their problems solved.

I second the post tagging. I suggest tagging threads based on more diverse topics, field and software etc. It'll be great if members are alerted when there are new questions related to their fields, just like ResearchGate. It will help members to help each other. It's sad to see a lot of new threads created every day but many left unanswered or unsolved.