As most users of MaplePrimes are aware, we currently reward participation with a number that indicates Maple Rank. So every time someone posts a forum comment, for example, they are awarded 1 point. This number gets appended to user names and it has become a way to immediately recognize a person’s ‘prestige’ within MaplePrimes.

This system has served us well, but we would like to expand & improve upon it for the latest incarnation of Primes, which we are currently in the process of developing.

Our idea is to have two separate measurements for each user:

1. Reputation
2. Badges
   

Badges signify actions that users have taken within the site, and are closely related to the current Maple Rank. There will be a considerable number of available badges and some will be quite easy to get (e.g., “Thumbs-Up Badge” for up-voting a post for the first time), while others will be quite a bit harder (e.g., “Maple Master Badge” for answering 25 Maple-related questions with each getting at least 5 up-votes). In addition, some badges can be obtained once, while others can be obtained multiple times.

Reputation is something entirely new for Primes, but will become an important new aspect of the site. It is essentially a measure of how other users value your input – sort of like a Primes karma score. For example, if have a post, question or answer rated positively by another user, your reputation score will increase. Reputation can theoretically also be used to determine certain capabilities on the site. For instance, someone with a reputation score of 250 could be allowed to add tags to another person’s post.

Badges and reputation score will be displayed in your public profile within the site.

So what are your thoughts or opinions about this? We are currently working on defining the specifics behind how each of these systems will work, but the general idea is to add reward valuable behaviour within the community, and also to make things fun.

We are also discussing how exactly we will calculate reputation for our legacy Primes users, which is a bit interesting considering we have no real measure of “up votes” in our current MaplePrimes. 

Bryon