I'm curious what the intent of the scoring/ ranking will be used for on the site...  Can you fill us in?

I'd also be curious whether this could be leveraged in some fashion for those of us who are posting on the site. 

I'd think it'd be interesting to see something like "Blog Quality" where we get to rank the detail and content in a blog.  We get pear review and feedback!

I'd also think it'd be interesting if we could score posts in the forum to encourage more detail.

I'm not sure if the curent star system would work well or not though...  I think that a 3 position score could work better.  Users would select whether a post or blog either "Positive Impact (added to the thread)", "Neutral Impact (neither adds or detracts)", or "Negative Impact (took away from the thread/ unneeded.)  


The reason I bring this up is that I've observed recent members, who joined during a contest promotion, make repeated identical forum posts, dumped duplicative content from another website into blogs, etc. in what appeared to be a way to rank up points and claim a prize.   This is simply a personal observation/ opinion.

If we had a way to score postings, we could encourage more quality posts within the community.

There might be other ways to incorperate/ leverage the scoring into the community later on down the road (searching for high quality bloggers and reading what they have posted or sorting blogs by the highest ranking posts.)  We might even be able to use it as a type of "kudos" ranking in the forums for pears to indicate if someone gave a very good/ exemplorary response to a question.
     
 Just ideas...

Erik,

Thank you for your post.  I think you have some very valid suggestions here. We'll follow up with you on how we might implement some of your suggestions.

Annette Rossi