You have to be careful with this idea because you don’t want to promote just “volume” of postings - but it would be very interesting to see experimentation (perhaps via plugin) with leaderboards to help encourage quality participation in the forums.
I’m thinking of things like multiple leaderboards - for people with the highest number of “likes”, or perhaps likes per month (so it doesn’t just bias towards people who have been at the site the longest), or perhaps some calculated leaderboard with weighting towards different things like likes, regularity of participation, etc…
It seems like this could be very beneficial in encouraging quality participation. Any other thoughts on this topic?
But a) there is no broad rep score to use and “like” is kind of an intentionally squishy metric and b) I think badging / achievements would have to come way before that.
Well, badge work is underway. I have wanted a way to look at most-liked users on a given site for various reasons, and users who I have personally liked the most.
I would love to implement a leaderboard instance for monthly and overall “like’s” on one of my Discourse Instances. I’m imaging some sort of simple side bar plugin which has 3 tabs at the top and displays 5 users below it. The 3 tabs would go between most likes all time, monthly, and one other feature and then the Users could earn month specific badges. i.e.: Most Valued Contributor February 2015
Maybe this would be annoying over time to always highlight on the home page but it would certainly be a large “motivator” to our potential audience.