Woohoo! I opted for the Boxed Mandrake, and recieved it today! It's the PowerPack Edition! Yeah, I love Mandrake, and actually had a tough time deciding between that awesome book, or a boxed copy of Mandrake.

Thanks alot Jeremy!

Glad to hear you liked the prize MasterC. Just a heads up to everyone. There are now four winners every week (and it looks like the two prizes this week may go unclaimed)!

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=38408

--jeremy

where are the quizzes?

ok i found the quizzes

A little bit late, but this weeks winners are deesto and DavidPhillips. Don't forget - next week there are four possible winners!

--jeremy

I would have prepared a speech, but I didn't. So I will just have to say thanks.

It looks like affero is a little slow catching on. I guess people just don't know what it is, or they just get too busy to bother with it. Maybe the contest will help promote it.

This weeks winners (a little belated I know) are hv and Mik. Thanks for participating!

--jeremy

Last weeks winners are:

Aussie
xcon

Conrats!

--jeremy

Congrats on the win!!

Just a few notes:

- Since December 1st, over $464 in prizes have been awarded to the weekly contest winners.
- Almost 20 members have been rated, but did not have their affero usernames filled out in their profile.

Here is a winner summary:
--jeremy

Oh man, I guess some people either don't know about it (if they spend any time in this forum I don't know why though) or maybe they just don't want to (I wouldn't know why though?)

Congratulations Aussie and xcon!

Cool

w00h00!
What a thing to wake up to on new years day :-)
Now I have to go and store myself in a cool dark place for a few hours......

Well, only around 300 people have viewed this particular thread, so we might assume that many people who use lq aren't informed. Although many people get the newsletters and you would think they would read them...

Aside from that, it's also possible that a) people don't know what to do or b) people don't see any value in giving thanks to others. Also, maybe it's just too much trouble. It's hard to know unless people speak up...and many of the people who won't speak up are the ones that need to

I ran into a guy at the Creative Commons party two weeks ago in San Francisco, and he said that he had clicked an affero link in someones email message, came to the affero rate/donate page and wasn't sure what he should do there. We came into the office the next day to try to figure out why he, of all people, didn't know what to do. He's a very clever guy. After scratching our heads for awhile, we decided to give some examples in the margin of the screen to show people what to write. I think its been a good improvement. We've already noticed a statistical improvement in the number of people who are writing comments.

We've also noticed that people tend to respond better to certain signatures than others. For example, DavePhillips sig generates a lot of clicks. Actually, more than any others that we've seen in all of our users. His sig says Also, we've noticed that a direct request in the message itself generates an extremely high response. Actually, this seems to be the best way to get action, but it requires thought each time a message is written.

If anyone else has any ideas for improving our service, please post them here or send us a note.

-Henri Poole (logged in under Reed's account)

This might be more work/bandwidth than it'd be worth, but what about some sorta screen that the user is sent to after a reply? I know that might not be such a great idea... OH! How about a 3rd button:
From the screen I am at now (I almost always use the quick reply) there are 2 buttons for me to click when I am ready to send this response. Maybe make a 3rd button that will submit the response, and open up a second screen to rate the person. Also, place a drop down menu next to this new button with a list of names of people who have replied in that thread, so if the person wants to rate them, they'll just have to click the drop down menu, bring up the username, then click the "Submit and Rate" button to submit the reply, and be returned to the thread, and another browser window open up taking them to the selected persons affero page.

Anyway, just some ideas, I know they suck but maybe they'll help to get the idea train rollin

Cool

I recently say another board that implemented:
a) something similar to what MasterC suggested here (simple rating with a reply), as well as
b) a hall of fame standings for the current month, and the top "expert" for the previous month (for each forum separately).

It was nicely done, although I'm not sure how it could be done here...visually speaking. The thing that impressed me most about it was that it seemed to be actively used (and appreciated) by the community.

Many rating systems only get limited use. I think the reason that this was used by this particular community was the ease of submitting a rating, coupled with the immediate feedback of seeing your ratings have an affect.

-Henri