Identifying up-and-coming top contributors

Community
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How are you identifying up-and-coming top contributors?

It’s pretty easy to pull up a list of accounts and how often they’re contributing and deduce a list of top contributors, but is there any way to identify accounts that are trending in a direction towards becoming a top contributor?

I’d love to better “nurture” those accounts - e.g. simple actions such as recognizing their contributions with reactions/replying with a “Love this response” etc.

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I think you can pull a lot of information out using the data explorer. It would depend on what criteria you’re using to class a top contributor, but you can use queries like this one to see who’s close to becoming a TL3, for instance Find the users which are more likely to become TL3 - #19 by ganncamp

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FYI you can use Claude (I’m using 3.5 Sonnet) to create quite complex queries. I created a query that gives users a score based upon very specific criteria I gave it. It took a lot of back forth to get it where I wanted, but in the end I’m thrilled with the results, the hardest part is figuring out the criteria to use.

I tried OpenAI and Gemini for this as well, and Claude was the undeniable winner.

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Our first run at this was the leaderboard, but it seems to weight pure volume (think “Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet? Hello?”) versus quality. Okay, yes “quality” is hard to algo, altho there are some obvious tweaks to be made.

What we’ve started doing to identify truly helpful users is to

look for threads where another user is the first to answer 
-- Goal: Find topics where first non-OP reply is a non-SonarSourcer

WITH

SonarSourcers AS (
    SELECT u.id AS user_id
    FROM groups g
    INNER JOIN group_users gu ON g.id=gu.group_id
    INNER JOIN users u ON u.id = gu.user_id
    WHERE g.name='sonarsourcers'
),

tagged_topics AS (
    SELECT tt.topic_id
    FROM topic_tags tt
    JOIN tags t on t.id=tt.tag_id
    WHERE name = 'me-too'
),


-- find 'regular' topics created by normal users
topic_user AS (
    SELECT id as topic_id, user_id, created_at
    FROM topics
    LEFT JOIN SonarSourcers ss USING(user_id)
    LEFT JOIN tagged_topics tt on topics.id = tt.topic_id
    WHERE ss.user_id IS NULL  -- omit topics started by SonarSourcers
        AND tt.topic_id IS NULL -- omit topics tagged with me-too
        AND user_id > 0  -- omit DiscoBot's 'Welcome' PM/tutorial threads
        AND visible = TRUE
        AND archived = FALSE
        AND archetype='regular'
        AND created_at::DATE > '2023-07-01'
),

-- find first non-OP reply to user topics
min_response AS (
    SELECT p.topic_id, tu.created_at, MIN(post_number) as post_number
    FROM posts p
    JOIN topic_user tu USING(topic_id)
    WHERE p.post_type = 1
        AND p.user_id != tu.user_id
        AND p.post_number > 1
        AND p.hidden = false
        AND p.deleted_at IS NULL
    GROUP BY topic_id, tu.created_at
)

SELECT p.topic_id, p.user_id, mr.created_at::DATE as thread_date
FROM posts p
JOIN min_response mr ON p.topic_id = mr.topic_id AND p.post_number=mr.post_number
LEFT JOIN SonarSourcers ss ON p.user_id=ss.user_id
LEFT JOIN user_badges ub on p.id = ub.post_id and ub.badge_id=110
WHERE ss.user_id IS NULL -- eliminate topics where SonarSourcer is first to respond
    AND ub.user_id IS NULL -- eliminate topics where a badge has already been granted
ORDER BY mr.created_at DESC

Once we identify those threads, we evaluate the user response and then either award the responding user a “Users helping Users” badge or tag the thread with a (invisible to non-staff) “me-too” tag. (BTW, this user-response report has the happy side effect of spotting incidents in our cloud service quickly. :joy:)

From there it gets easy to further reward helpful users, and identify them for further nurtures.

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Loving these responses so far :raised_hands:

I guess the hardest part is defining what a top contributor is - and attributes that measure qualitative rather than quantitative data.

e.g. is a member who replies 50 times and 90% of their replies marked as solutions more of a top contributor who contributes 100 times but only 10% of replies marked as solutions?

At the moment, top contributors are fairly easy to identify, as they’re the ones we see the most around the community. But I’m guessing we need more concrete criteria that we can use to identify those close, or on a path towards.

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If your self hosted or on a plan that supports. Have you considered gamification plugin?

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Yeah. The leaderboard is a great way to see the more active users. For example, most forums’ top posters occupy the top 10 spots. These spots are mostly Regulars and Leaders, due to their high activity and hence climbing high and getting promoted.

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Indeed just need to be sure the leaderboard excludes staff. :wink:

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I think you’re hitting the nail on the head here. This is mostly a qualitative rather than a quantitative thing.

I’ve had really useful contributors with a few posts per month and I’ve had useless ones with a few dozen per week. The leaderboard is a great starting place to separate the wheat from the chaff, but in the end it’ll be your judgement as a community manager :slight_smile:

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I generally look at three quantitative data points:

  • The leaderboard for the last period.
  • The userboard for the last period, sorted by posts, likes, and visits.
  • Their profiles, to understand in which area they are contributing the most.

And three qualitative aspects:

  • Type of posts: Are they questions? Are they answers?
  • Quality of posts: Are they short comments? Are they valuable contributions?
  • Mood of the posts: Are they sharp or understanding? Do they align with your culture or go against it?
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