Leaderboard Rewards

One thing I'd like to figure out is how to incentivize new users. Why bother trying to reach the leaderboard when you're up against folks who have been building their XP for a half decade now...

Great idea!

First suggestion is to give some reward upon reaching 200 best replies (almost there!) hahaha, just kidding!

Also congrats to @snapey and @bobbybouwmann for reaching such impressive total XP.

While writing my first answer I didn't saw your second one yet.

Two suggestions I would make regarding that is giving more weight on "best replies", and introduce points to series completion, so it incentivizes users to complete the series. There are lot of repeated doubts that could be easily solved by watching more of the content.

But thanks for the great platform, if not by Laracasts I wouldn't have the Laravel knowledge I have today, it's been 4 years now I am working from home and providing my family mainly with Laravel, and Laracasts have a central role on it.

@jeffreyway good to hear.

One thing I would like to see is a way to go from annual subscription to lifetime and to have the cost reduce the longer you have paid for annual subscriptions.

Hopefully if you can introduce a leaderboard perk for this that would be fantastic, as, although I've been on laracasts for 2 years now, my grinding over the last three months means I should hopefully hit top 50 by end of today (with any luck and best answers).

@rodrigo.pedra you do currently get an additional 100 Jeff smeckles for completing a series. 500 for best reply seems reasonable too.

At this stage, getting to the top of the leaderboard for most is a virtually impossible task unless existing contributors retire - but then, what you see at the top of the list would be people that you never see participating. It's taken me 6 years of daily attendance to be in the fortunate position I'm in now.

Perhaps either a 'seasonal' league, eg 2021 leaderboard (as well as 'all-time' leaderboard ;-) ) or have xp points that only have, say, a 24 month life or reduce in value over time. This would reward continuous participation rather than legacy participation and XP could actually go down over time ! This latter suggestion avoids the turmoil that might occur each time everyone starts at zero.

Adding to the suggestions that have been placed, it would be nice to have the posts/replies count viewable somewhere. I feel like this is pretty much standard on every forums and it could benefit to the "Chatty Cathy" badge which has no visible metric compared to all other badges.

Btw @snapey I like your seasonal leaderboard idea!

Oh and I just thought about that. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to pick what badges you want show (with a limit of course)? I don't think it is possible as of now.

Great ideas.

It takes alot of work and dedication to get "up there", but it is possible. That said I never expect to reach top 2.

A seasonal, and all time running side by side is a really nice idea

Maybe it would be a good idea to have something similar to Employee of the Month but for users. Where will be a table with list of top 50 users for every month. First 10 of them get extra experience and first 3 of them get medails (gold, silver, bronze). On the user profile then we would see the count of medails.

So there will be leadboard how we have it now. But also a list of users of the month and a list of users of the year (it will be just sum of months).

I got my first best reply in April this year and after 6 months I have 888 right now and it was really long way, but I think that I reached 500 best reply in July because I was motivated, but now in front of me is just 8 people and my next milestone is a million experience which I reach maybe in January. I hope so :)

But @snapey and @bobbybouwmann are so far away, so my target is just third place in the leaderboard.

@michaloravec I would have more best answers if yours weren't so good :P

@automica ditto!

Along with best answers, it would be good to improve the search on laracasts. Google search is more powerful.

Many newcomers don't know about:

site:laracasts.com search term here

As questions like dealing with checkbox data comes up it seems every two weeks.

I, @snapey , @michaloravec all probably have several best answers on just repeat topics.

But that's just a suggestion so newcomers can find how to topics easier.

And @jeffreyway please do a free video on multi-authentication. It's another repeat question.

And dealing with checkbox array. And uploading multiple images. And putting laravel on a shared host.

Those are some big repeat questions.

Edit:

How about a most asked topic drop down on the forum or something similar. And replies going back a year or so there, even up to 2 years.

Then when someone is going to enter a new post, have a modal reminding them to search first.

I know, forget the modal thing.

@jlrdw maybe a means to add tags to a post like some big *overflow site we don't like using.

@jeffreyway I would love to see some direct benefits for the community like top group of developers working on projects. Maybe that way we can create more job positions or oportunities for juniors to learn first hand.

I like the idea of top contributer of the month. I would also not mind some nice swag like you mentioned, t-shirts, mugs and such. Maybe even a Laracon ticket for being the top contributer of the year or somesuch.

@tray2 maybe you win trip to a Laracon, and they have it in Hawaii, all expenses paid. haha.

Here is a best answer to think over: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/credentials-dont-working-in-login-form

I like the idea of top contributor on a monthly basis to compliment the all-time leaderboard. I don't think I'd expand upon it any further than that. I also like the idea of simple reward-based incentives.

I'll just add one thing that I find disincentivizing - threads that are never closed with a Best Reply. I find that we can expect to be rewarded with a Best Reply approximately one out of five times. This is not a direct result of replies of poor quality, but rather the OP just never selects one. I've come to the conclusion that the majority of these threads left unresolved are because a) the OP forgets to mark it as solved, or b) the OP lacks attention to detail and doesn't realize the feature exists - which is an unfortunate characteristic for an inspiring developer.

Anyway.. it would be nice to somehow encourage thread authors to select Best Replies, which in turn will further incentivize participation. Maybe have a notification flag, similar to the one when someone is tagged, reminding the member to review their recent "open" threads. Maybe send out a monthly email with a manifest of all their raised topics that have replies but have not provided a Best Reply. Maybe modify the thread view for the OP to make it more obvious that the community appreciates a Best Reply to be selected. I'm just spit-balling ideas, but I'd like something done to try to improve upon a best reply being selected approximately 20% of the time on quality solutions provided.

I'll just add one thing that I find disincentivizing - threads that are never closed with a Best Reply. I find that we can expect to be rewarded with a Best Reply approximately one out of five times.

@talinon I think it is far less than that. In my case I would even go one out of twenty. I think that the reason is that they do not come back to the forum after solution was suggested.

Anyway.. it would be nice to somehow encourage thread authors to select Best Replies, which in turn will further incentivize participation.

Maybe best way would be for @jeffreyway to create moderators for the forum that can do that after a certain time. The only thing that scares me in that scenario is that @snapey and @bobbybouwmann would have more than double experience they have now which will render them absolutely uncatchable 😁

@jlrdw, one can only hope ;)

I was thinking more like to the one closest to your location.

@tray2 Have them come to Abilene, Texas. I will buy you breakfast at Denny's. If the Pandemic is over.

I think this is great @jeffreyway !!

In addition to what has already been said

The basic idea is that, as you help out on the forum, once you reach a certain XP rank, you'd then qualify for various perks

The thing here is that today XP depends not only on helping out on the forum, but also on just viewing videos, which in my opinion not always can be immediately translated to being more experienced.

I really like the idea of top contributor/s of the month, although if the idea is to promote collaboration and helping others, I believe both the current Leaderboard and/or the Top Contributor of the Month should be centered around Best Replies (and maybe, with less weight, on just replying too) without taking into consideration the amount videos seen or giving this far less weight.

Otherwise, it could be easy to just mark a lot of videos as complete to rank higher for a particular month instead of helping others, considering also what @talinon and @bugsysha said about a lot of threads that are never closed.

Maybe the amount of videos lessons completed could rank for a third leaderboard?

I like @bugsysha idea of moderators too.

@marianomoreyra I can see moderating an unsafe practice, like link I gave above. But many answers are subjective.

• Person A gives answer using query builder
• Person B gives eloquent answer

Moderator might complain about query builder answer. It could become a mess.

I would restrict moderation to Foul language, demeaning someone, un-secure authentication techniques, things like that.

If Jeffrey implements moderation, I feel that there should be a list of what's moderated.

I try to answer someone with real World in mind.

Example:

• A question was about collections, fine.
• Best answer was a quick cut and paste.

The problem, yes the question was answered, but it was a warehousing type question, and my answer was to use a query. Eventually that warehouse data would grow to hundreds of thousands of products.

Can you imagine amazon or Fedex "collecting" their millions of DB transactions for a group by.

Even a moderator may be good at laravel and collections, but would the moderator say the best answer was great and answered question exactly, or would they at least point out alternatives, or even complain about a query being mentioned when the question was a collection.

But just an example.......

Edit: Not disagreeing, just saying programming can be subjective.

Hee @jeffreyway

Thanks for reaching out! It's great that your working on a different reward system, other than experience points. I personally backed down a little bit the last few months, to give other people a chance to answer questions and step up in the community. I still love doing it, and I will keep doing it for sure ;)

I definitely think a month or quarterly reward system would give newcomers to the community a kickstart for sure. The leaderboard itself is very cool, so it would be nice if we probably can keep both. Where you have the "old" people and the "new" people who put in an effort for a few months.

Regarding the rewards. A new set of unique badges would be cool. Since the introduction of badges, there is some kind of gamification in Laracasts. I personally have all badges, so it would be cool to see some new ones. Could even be a badge like "Monthly top contributor", "Guest speaker" or even "Watcher of 99% of the content". I think there are a ton of badges you can still come up with.

Finally, I want to thank @jeffreyway for all the opportunities Laracats brought me. I got the chance to help others get their dream job, make them better developers, and build a name in the community. Since I started contributing to Laracasts I have spoken at conferences and meetups, I found a full-time job as Laravel Evangelist, I'm part of multiple startups and have been consulting on Laravel. Even released my own video here on Laracasts. How awesome is that?

@jeffreyway THE SOCKS!! DON'T FORGET THE LARACASTS SOCKS! I NEED IT!!

@bobbybouwmann which video?

@jlrdw https://laracasts.com/series/guest-spotlight/episodes/7

Great idea @jeffreyway mugs, t-shirts, lifetime subscriptions all good for us still trying to get up the leader and also newcomers. Maybe something like reach level 25 get a mug, level 30 t-shirt and then increase the levels to maybe if you get 100 you get a lifetime subscription.

That way not everyone will reach but the likes of @bobbybouwmann @snapey might just get there as they are collectively helping us all learn and understand more and more each day.

@jlrdw I would not allow moderators to choose best reply, but a possible reply which does not give as much points as best reply but still gives some. Maybe half.

@snapey having just made top 50 today, i'm coming for you :P