User Recognition system feature in Microsoft Developer Community Forums

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The developer community forums teams have been hard at work releasing a new service pack (SP5) for Microsoft Forums. With this release we have added User Recognition system to forums for answering questions and providing bug information. This feature is currently available in the forums. A recognition system gives users points for actions deemed beneficial to the health of the online community. We believe giving users points for helpful actions will condone positive behavior and entice users to enrich community content. Different actions on the site will provide different rewards. See the chart below for things you can do to earn points:

 

 Action

Points

You reply to a question or bug thread started by another user

2

Your reply is marked as the answer

10

Your reply is voted as being helpful

10

Your reply to a bug thread is marked as a workaround

10

You submit a bug that is resolved as fixed by Microsoft

20

A bug you submitted is validated by another user

4

 

These points accumulate in the user’s profile. As the user gains points, they earn stars that appear under their name in the thread view:

 

 

User recognition will be enabled upon deployment for all Microsoft Forums sites, including MSDN and TechNet. We plan to make the points retroactive beginning one-year ago.

 

Additional Changes in SP5:

New features

· User recognition point system for creating/replying to a thread or marking a post as answered

· Product feedback functionality that allows users to submit bugs and suggestions directly into Product Studio

Improvements to the post editor

· Enabling WYSIWYG preview from HTML View

· Preserving the code snippet font in the Show Post page

· Allowing text selection in previous post for copy/paste when replying to a post

Improvements to RSS

· Fixing RSS subscription error caused by non-printable characters in post author name

· Fixing date format in RSS

Layout and display fixes

· Fixing page layout problems when Display Name is maximum length

· Syncing post date on show forum page and show post page

Forums functionality fixes

· Making “View By Attribute” value set in My Threads sticky when navigating to other pages

· Fixing redirection issue in persona page

· Updating “Last Active Date” to reflect last date user posted to site

· Resolving unknown error when attempting to use "next" link on search results page for a specific user

 

Cheers.

 

Anand..