Incorporating "Solutions" into leaderboards / MOTM calculations

[CarolineS]

Hi folks!

@Adam had the excellent suggestion of incorporating "Accepted Solutions" into our leaderboards and MOTM calculations. His reasoning is that it should count for something when your answer is marked as a solution.

We definitely want to encourage solution-marking and solution-writing - threads with marked solutions are much more useful down the road when folks land on them. The question is: what's the best way to do it? Here are some options - not mutually exclusive:

1. Include a "Top Solution Authors" leaderboard on the home page and/or on each board's landing page page (along with the kudos board, perhaps just below it)  (note that there's no leaderboard available that combines the two)
2. When calculating MOTMs, include solutions as one of the criteria (e.g. kudos + 2*solutions = MOTM score) (since solutions are a bit harder to get, and probably more valuable to the community, they should be worth more?)
3. Simply include the solution count in the MOTM announcement, but don't incorporate it into the scoring
4. Other ideas I'm not thinking of 🙂

Curious for your thoughts and feedback on this. I'm going to @-mention past MOTMs here, but anyone is welcome to chime in. @PhilipDAth @Adam @MRCUR @jared_f @MerakiDave @Mr_IT_Guy @MilesMeraki @geoffbernard @Uberseehandel @BHC_RESORTS

Cheers!

[CarolineS]

@WadeAlsup too! I can only @mention 10 users per post 🙂

[Mr_IT_Guy]

I do like this idea. I've wondered if there was a way to reward our Solution experts. That being said, what's to stop me from marking my own post as a solutions and thus inflating my numbers. I saw a post a few weeks ago (I don't remember which) where one community member posted a solution to a problem only for the OP to post a thanks and mark their own post as solution. It's going to have to require a bit more on your part @CarolineS to make sure that marked solutions are legit when calculating totals.

I do like the idea of solutions being worth double though! I think a sound solution is worth more to the community. That being said, I'm ready to see @PhilipDAth hit over 200 in a month with a system like that!

[Adam]

Interesting observation, I didn't know you could mark your own reply as a solution.  That could throw a wrench in things if that can't be disabled.  But I was most inclined to lean toward option 2.  I think solutions are valuable.  My mental frame of mind is the following:  I give kudos to anyone that contributes useful or interesting feedback in a thread.  I give a solution if it is a solid answer to a question that doesn't really require more discussion. 

[CarolineS]

Here's some data... I just calculated the proposed MOTM "score" (kudos + 2x solutions) retroactively for each month of 2018, and in each case it's the same four MOTMs as it would be if based purely on kudos (sometimes in slightly different order). And Philip's top score is 163 - so he can have a new goal of reaching 200 🙂

My inclination, with the goal of making solutions more visible / better incentivized / more reflective of their value to the community, is to do the following (starting in June):

(1) Add solutions leaderboards below kudos leaderboards on the home page and boards in order to make solutions more visible

(2) calculate MOTMs based on (kudos + 2*solutions) (but still list out kudos count & solution count individually)

The team here can be on the lookout for folks marking their own answers as solutions, and if it becomes a problem we'll address it - but, for now, I wouldn't actively remove any solutions that were marked by their own author from the calculation. If you post a question and then figure out the answer on your own, it's super if you report back here & mark the solution.

Yah?

[Mr_IT_Guy]

Works for me! 

[MRCUR]

I think your proposed solution will work well @CarolineS! There should definitely be some "value" to the solutions for the leaderboards as posting solutions is important, especially as the community grows and people come here to search for exact issues and their solutions. 

I do agree with @Mr_IT_Guy that sometimes the "solutions" selected by OP's are a bit dubious, but this isn't a big deal for now as the community is still rather small. 

[PhilipDAth]

Can "kudos + 2x solutions" be calculated automatically by the "system" or will a human have to "score" this job every month?

[CarolineS]

It will be manual. Some community platforms do this sort of thing automatically, but not this one! (Well, it could be done via some custom code, but we try to steer away from that. I suppose it would be pretty easy to write a script to calculate it - maybe I’ll do that! - but creating a leaderboard would be more complex)

[PhilipDAth]

I'm thinking if it requires manual human effort, and research has shown it makes no material impact to the "score" then it isn't worth doing.  Otherwise it is just creating more and more work for you.

The leaderboard sounds fine to me.

[CarolineS]

---

@PhilipDAth wrote:

I'm thinking if it requires manual human effort, and research has shown it makes no material impact to the "score" then it isn't worth doing.  Otherwise it is just creating more and more work for you.

It's very little work - it would add maybe 3 minutes a month. So I'm not concerned about that. And my hope is that it will make solutions more visible such that the "score" would be impacted in the future. We know threads marked as "solved" are a good thing, and want to encourage marking solutions more than we have been. Definitely open to other ideas for how to encourage marking solutions though!

[MerakiDave]

I'm on board @CarolineS so long as it's worth your time & effort, and I agree it's worth drawing more attention and incentivizing solutions.  It's also great that the original poster gets a "was your question answered?" reminder which also encourages solution marking.  I tend to agree with the others that abuse probably won't be a problem, and if it becomes a problem, it'll be easy enough to notice and report, especially if someone is artificially inflating thier stats.

[CarolineS]

And we're live! See the announcement. I also wrote an About Solutions help article.