Reputation System 2.0: Requirement of 2 Additional Appreciation buttons next to "Likes": "Insightful", "Actionable"

VP Tech Requirements
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I sent this appeal to Team Discourse, a couple of days back. The message is self-explainatory.

Request everyone at VP to give this a serious read (not only the Techies) :slight_smile:

Hi Team Discourse,

First of all, a huge dose of gratitude from all ValuePickrs!!

You have built an amazing forum platform that our community loves, and has been using since 2015 (migrated from earlier Drupal based 2010 forum platform).

Average DAU/MAU is ~40% which is a benchmark we strive to keep improving every year.
(Daily Average User/Monthly Average User)

Started in 2010, forum.valuepickr.com is the only dedicated equity investing platform in India with a continuously chronicled dynamic history of the journey of micro/small/mid cap listed enterprises in India over last 10 years. Repository is full of well-chronicled success stories like Mayur Uniquoter, Astral Polytechnik. Ajanta Pharma, Avanti Feeds, PI Industries to name a few. ValuePickr members Ayush & Donald were featured in Forbes India Wealth Wizards Issue, July 2015. Them and several other forum members have been prominently featured in India leading business daily Economic Times over several years.

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ValuePickr has survived a decade!

From a fledgling investing collaboration experiment in 2010, today we have grown to over 38000+ registered ValuePickrs - membership cutting across every professional domain, expertise ranging from newbies, learners, senior investors, senior academics, to professional analysts & fund managers, to deep domain experts - actively collaborating on businesses of mutual interest!

ValuePickr strives and thrives on 3 Principles - Democratic (will be always FREE), Accountable, provide Actionable Advice.

Thanks for bearing with our plug-in for India’s top Investing platform!

We believe at the heart of user stickiness at ValuePickr is the User LIkes (Hearts) Reputation system of Discourse

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The User Reputation System (Hearts - Likes based) has been very useful in showcasing Top Contributions as rated by Members themselves, and at an aggregated level the Top Contributors. However the need is acutely felt for 2 additional Appreciation buttons (emojis) along side the “Hearts” to appear

  1. "Insightful"
  • Appreciation for higher-order contribution posts that are found to be insightful for members - that connect the dots picture for them, helps folks read in between the lines and/or the numbers in the business, brings out clearly say vulnerabilities in the business model or the strengths - essentially stuff that comes from deep domain expertise, or deep familiarity with a business and/or investing acumen, and stuff like that - you may not readily find/absorb from books/theory
  1. "Actionable"
  • Appreciation for even higher-order contribution - call-to-action posts that translate investing theory to practical application - that anyone can easily understand, adopt, take forward - revealing scuttlebutt on a business, or industry, or a compact brief on a business, or a Management interview, or simple execution itself - ideas that are relevant, resonate well with a large number of folks, and/or are actionable in current investment environment. These are probably the highest contribution class of posts at ValuePickr in line with conceptual refinements brought to investment/analysis/valuation framework kind of posts.

Point is, today’s Likes only User Reputation System of Discourse is proving inadequate for ValuePickr Platform needs as a growing platform, that will soon cross a 100,000 registered member mark.

We need a more sophisticated user reputation system that separates the wheat from the chaff even better. That accords highest recognition and visibility to the most insightful and actionable posts in member’s-eyes, and at the aggregated level helps us highlight, spot, and recognises our most valuable Top Contributors (weighted by higher-order contributions too, not just by volumes).

The present quantitative-only system is also prone to gaming by some folks (posting/repeating mostly theory - shorn of real insights, or Actionables) - which has an audience too with large number of newbies joining in appreciating that), but NOT seen to be posting self-growth-inducing insightful and/or actionable posts - which is what we at ValuePickr strive to incentivise, day in and day out!

Critical time for a good mix of Quantitative-and-Qualitative user/posts Reputation System in Discourse Platform for ValuePickr, which we believe can be easily achieved by simple addition of these two additional appreciation buttons (next to Hearts) and integrated into the aggregated/summarised views currently available in Discourse. ValuePickr will find it extremely timely and useful, and so would millions of forum members on Discourse platforms, all over the world.

Kindly let us know

  1. if Team Discourse has plans for these on similar lines, already planned, and timelines. If not, would Team Discourse prioritise that? And how can Team ValuePIckr help - specifications, etc.

  2. If any authorised plug-ins exist for similar functionality that can be augmented with ValuePickr requirements? How can ValuePickr reach out to them and help develop/co-develop? Introductions.

  3. If both not viable, how can Team ValuePickr go about developing an authorised plug-in that anyone can subsequently use for free? What kind of access/APIs will we need? Details

(ValuePickr has a big eco-system of Techies too, who might just be interested in helping the platform along).

Thanks for your patience in reading the rather long email. Hoping this receives an urgent and sympathetic hearing from Team Discourse.

13 Likes
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Response received the same day.

Hello Donald,

Thank you for the kind words and your love for Discourse, we appreciate you taking the time to put your thoughts out this way.

We created a specific #feature category for topics like this in our community. You are welcome to post future messages and topics like this in that category so everyone can join in and benefit from the discussion.

That said, have you seen this plugin:

Retort - a reaction-style plugin for Discourse plugin

Retort is a plugin which allows you to add slack-style reactions to posts [image] Install it using the standard plugin installation instructions. It’s stable, supported, and works with the latest Discourse. Check out the code, or view it live on the demo site (note that you’ll need to make an account to use the plugin) If you have a bug or feature request, please post it here (and tag me, @gdpelican), and I’ll respond as quickly as I can. Cool features Category-specific retortions - if re…

You should check it out. And if you’d like to continue discussions on this, I’d suggest reading through that topic and sharing your own thoughts there or in the wider community for more discussion. We generally reserve this channel and prioritize core features suggested by our hosted customers.

Osioke.

Participants: team (43), Pratyush Mittal, Donald Francis

Additional input that came in:

A quick note Donald, I am not recommending the Retort plugin, just pointing you in that direction. You might need to do a lot of work on the plugin to make it safe for use on your forum as it frequently breaks sites.

Osioke.

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Sure enough, Pratyush was quick to the task, and recommends the following:

Hi Bhaiya,

Retort plugin is pretty good. It can solve some of the purpose.

The latest version is pretty stable: GitHub - gdpelican/retort: A reactions plugin for Discourse

It allows you to customise the emojis you want to allow.

So we can basically disable the default like (if possible) and use 3 emojis in retort:

  • Heart for like

  • Bulk for insightful

  • Thumbs up for actionable.

And quick on the Actionables too!
Following stuff is ONLY for interested Techies eyes :slight_smile:

Hi Bhaiya,

I have created a working demo from a backup 4 days ago.

To use the backup-version, we need to add this line in /etc/hosts file (on mac and linux). There must be something similar in Windows too.

165.22.217.78 forum.valuepickr.com

After adding this line, visiting forum.valuepickr.com will show the demo version with content 4 days old. Here we can safely play with anything.

Once we are satisfied, we can delete this demo version.

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Finally cut to the chase :slight_smile:

For the interested and able techies, who would like to check out, and play around!

Prerequisites:
Ruby on Rails expertise — Discourse back end API is a Rails app. It responds to requests RESTfully in JSON. Ember.js — Our front end is an Ember.js app

We need to install Retort plugin (GitHub - gdpelican/retort: A reactions plugin for Discourse) referenced by Pratyush, above. Carry out modifications as suggested for our requirements, and/or find workarounds, and then play around/ test rigorously, to certify fit-for-migration.

This is an URGENT requirement. We want to enable as soon as possible. Expert hands like @pratyushmittal, @jagbir are there to guide the exploration/feasibility, and help taking forward, as necessary.

Soliciting Volunteers who have the bandwidth, and Senior Techies who might not have the bandwidth but can help guide.

Please step up, and help!

@pratyushmittal @jagbir
Please check above posts (I might have mis-represented something). Please add necessary information/guidelines

1 Like
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I assume you need someone to test the new functionality… For all the leanings i got from valuepickr I can help with this. I already edited my host file on my mac and I could see the old version. But there is no new functionality yet ?

I run discourse for my lab on Ubuntu server… I have some experiences with it. But I guess @pratyushmittal only needs a external tester.

2 Likes
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Things to do

  • Install the Retort plugin on the demo setup.
  • Disable / hide current like button
  • Choose 3 smileys from Retort
  • Try to see stats about which smiley is used in Retort
  • Push to production if it looks good.

Purpose
The current “like” reaction only provides stats about what people like. But every like is not equal. Some posts are “insightful”, some are “actionable” and some are “global gyan”.

Using Retort we can try to replace the current “like” emotion with the above 3 reactions. That can motivate people to post more actionable and insightful content rather than general content.

Actions
@Donald bhaiya, you might need to grant staff / admin access to @rajanprabu to allow admin access to him. It will be required for installing the plugin.

6 Likes
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Meanwhile as we await VP Reputation System 2.0 to come through, something that we can all do, as grateful members - suggestions below.

Here’s a very good example of an Insightful post I came across today that takes the discussion forward in such an impactful way.

If we concur, the least that we can do as grateful members is to
a) on a daily basis highlight and link to each such exemplary contributions that we come across (that reflects deep expertise) back here in this thread
b) go back to the original thread and push up the “Likes”
c) message and encourage each other to update our individual profile pages (About Me) section so we can move more purposefully & solidly, towards VP Expert Network 2.0

While doing that let us also please make sure to communicate that we RESPECT individual constraints and privacy concerns completely. The choice is left to the Individual (his/her constraint set)

2 Likes
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Very Insightful and helpful to which I will always come back when looking at NBFCs from now

1 Like
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Please don’t cut paste the entire post.

To avoid clutter, just insert the link to the post here (copy url in search bar - after positioning the linked post to top of page; you could make sure the link copied is the intended one - by copt pasting first on a new tab)

Please edit above post suitably. Thank you. and please message @fabregas - his profile surely needs an update (hopefully he may not have too many constraints).

1 Like
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@pratyushmittal I’ve checked the demo after making required changes in /etc/hosts. Clicking on add emoji giving me choice of 3 icons and upon selecting one it’s getting displayed at bottom right side of post. Though clicking on the icon again making it disappear. Let me know what to experiment more on this and how I can help further.

1 Like
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@jagbir - Thanks for finding the time, despite your very busy schedule. Appreciate.
Adding you to the Team discussion page.

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Just a thought. It will be useful if some emojis can be applied based on user level like Top Contributors only, Regular guys only. This can give lot of credibility to the post and can be used to show only posts liked by power users. Of course I don’t know if that is feasible with existing system and based on analytics this data may be available to admins…

1 Like