Tomorrow I will be attending the Online Community Unconference in Mountain View, CA. It's been a little bit over a year since the last time I attended this conference, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not people's focus has changed over the past year. Last year most of the topics revolved...

Over the past year, I've done quite a bit of blogging on reputation and got quite a bit of feedback back from you as a community. Well...I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that we're actually working on a reputation system. The bad news--it's "step one", and fairly basic. Below...

A little bit ago, I started talking about ways that we could measure the success of the community without using pure "answer count" as the only barometer for community health. I decided to do a little bit of data mining today and looked for the people who have received the highest number of "Helpful...

Last Edited: 4/6/2007 [I'll be amending the lists in this post based on the comments and continual feedback that comes in. Thanks for hanging with me here.] We've recently released a service pack for the forums that have changed some functionality in the forums. It's the first batch of noticeable...

When I first started with the DevDiv Customer Connection team, Josh gave me the thirty-second elevator speech about his goals for the forums. The phrase "self-sustaining community" was used more than once. The idea was that just creating the forums or getting Microsofties into the forums would make them...

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Online Community Camp run by Forum One Communications in San Francisco this past week, a gathering of people throughout the industry that were involved in some way connecting people using the power the Internet. Some of the conference attendees were “big”...

Josh scooped me to the story , but yesterday the Microsoft.com team released a service pack for the forums that deploys a few new features and fixes. Check out his blog post for the full run down. My favorite new feature, at least as far as taking baby steps towards a real reputation system, is the...

I used to think that rich profiles were dumb—that they were really only something that were only used by teenagers hell-bent on getting the latest and greatest AIM virus. Then I saw the Xbox.com Forums. Wow. Now those were great profiles. Why? The profiles mattered . It was more than just a bunch of...

A few of the comments I've gotten about my reputation system are telling me that I'm on the right track, but I'm really not doing enough to measure answer quality , not just quantity. Recently, the community lead for the C# team told me that she had been finding some of their newer moderators (who are...

On for the next part of phase 3 of the forums reputation system... It's not Microsoft's community... …it’s yours. So, as a community, it should be possible to do all of the same things I’m able to do in my site administration tool. Through a voting process available only to users with a certain...

Over the past month I’ve blogged a ton about my “crawl, walk, run” plan for a reputation system in the Microsoft Forums. Honestly, I’ve been putting off writing this “final” phase, because it’s pretty tough to write a vision for the do-all and end-all of online reputation systems. J So, let’s not call...

I've been writing quite a bit about reputation and auto-moderation on the MSDN Forums on this blog. It's been a cool way for me to organize my thoughts and collaborate a bit with other people on what we be great for the forums in the future--but it's basically just been a bunch of writing. Until now...

A couple of posts ago, I covered my vision for the first phase of a reputation system for the Microsoft forums . Now it’s time to build a case for Phase 2 (I feel a bit like I’m building a subdivision here…) Phase 1 of the reputation was focused on incenting and rewarding top answerers. Phase 2 of the...

In my last post about Trust and Reputation , I outlined what I believed were the key elements of reputation building in an online community: Activity Based Community Rewarded Visible Linked to Additional Privileges Obvious on How Reputation is Determined Reputation Takes Time ...

In my last post , I talked about how difficult it was to try and decide what groups of people you can trust in an online community. Outside of my simple and naive "Why don't we just trust anybody?", most online communities use a "reputation system" to establish trust and order on their sites. Some common...

Awhile ago, my manager and I were kicking around ideas to solve a problem in the MSDN Forums . By default, every new thread started on the forums is tagged as a "question". The question is considered "unanswered" until a reply is posted to that question that is marked as an "answer". The answer can get...