Hung Dinh
asked 10 years ago

There have been a lot of requests to integrate Points/Credits system with DW Q&A plugin. MyCred.me is the first one brought up to our attention. After a few  days playing & testing, I found it really awesome, thank you very much Gabriel for the amazing plugin. 

However, I have not had a chance to test other Credits/Points plugin, as I explained in my reply to @guruji  Guru Ghantaal‘s comment on the blog. I would love to know your experience with other points plugins so that we can start working on the integration. 

Josiah Wallingford
replied 10 years ago

My favorite point/credit plugin is MyCred by far. I would love to see integration with MyCred and BadgeOS if possible for badges.

Hung Dinh
replied 10 years ago

I fell in love with MyCred @Josiah. Already installed BadgeOS and playing around. It seems to be a very big plugin….

In fact, we are implimenting the Leaderboard feature for DW Q&A where richest $tones users will be honorred with Badges

Josiah Wallingford
replied 10 years ago

Awesome! Can’t wait for the update.

4 Answers
Guru
answered 10 years ago

Hi Hung,
Apologies for the delay in responding to your question. And I am sorry for the long answer.
Actually I took some time out trying and testing the various alternatives to DWQA. In fact before stumbling onto DWQA by chance I had tried a few other plugins but I wasn’t really happy with the whole user experience.
Here are some of the plugins that I tried and my verdict on them:
1. Answers by http://answers.cminds.com/
This is the first plugin I used, its very basic and the UI is more or less ugly. It does have the options for social login in pro version (for the plugin itself), and has a system of voting but I don’t see much with it unless there is a whole overhaul of the code.
2. Question and Answers http://wordpress.org/plugins/q-and-a/
Very wrongly named plugin, its essentially an faq management and display system and that is it(Full Stop)
3. Q&A by Wpmudev https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/qa-wordpress-questions-and-answers-
plugin/
This is a serious plugin but is only available as a pro version which means its not free. It comes with a number of options with a desing UI quite similar to DWQA. It also has the ability to edit answers at backend! Apart from other UI options to manipulate and style the template, it provides admins with options to set capabilities for various user roles, redirect users after submiting a question, setting up a thank you page, and even an unauthorized page redirection based on the user roles (it also has a QA visitor role, for which you can define capabilities e.g view, vote, flag, ask a question without an account and so on). It also allows them to add any additional css code directly in the settings page, (same as your other wordpress themes).
It does have a credit systm inbuilt. Although it does allow you to modify files to adjust credit point and multipliers, it fails to do provide any UI options for this purpose.
The credit/points system is very basic and straight forward and although there are no reduction in points for asking questions, there are negative points for bad answers which is good.
I haven’t seen any integration ability with buddypress or other credit and rating sytsem, the rating feature is useful for startup websites with very low visitor flow.
Extras: Comes with a number of widgets: Quesetions (Recent, Popular, Unanswered), Related Questions, Question Categories, Question Tags, and Users with highest reputation(based on credits)
4. SabaiDiscuss http://sabaidiscuss.com/screenshots
Again this is not a free plugin. But by far the most comprehensive and detailed Q & A plugin on the horizen. It has a multitude of options avialable and provids easy integration (through addons) with http://wordpress.org/plugins/cubepoints/ and other addons, making it the most complete Q&A plugin so far. And off course you can edit answers as an admin too.
It is very easy to install and setup with UI options for almost every thing (comes with builtin social share buttons for single-questions). And extra widgets for most useful options. It even has UI options for Min. length of keywords in characters in Search. And a selection of buttons to choose from, even one for the widegt (Ask a question button in the widget wow)
There is also an option to configure the title tag for the q&a pages. (seo savy)
It is its creit and reputation system that makes it better than any other plugin out there in the market right now. All credit scoring parameters can be set from within the UI. Here are the points
One of your questions is voted up: 5
One of your questions is voted down: -2
One of your answers is voted up: 10
One of your answers is voted down: -2
One of your answers become accepted: 15
You accept an answer posted to your question: 2
You vote an answer down: -1
You unvote a question: -1
You cancel an upvote on an answer: -1
One of your questions or answers is deleted as being spam: -100
If you look at the options it is a very feature rich and comprehensive solution but the catch is it is not free!
—————-
My personal favourite is DWQA with is simplicity and beautify frontend UI, and the fact that it is being developed into a much bigger and better plugin. The best example to follow is that of Stack overflow and you can see the features and voting guide here http://stackoverflow.com/about and I see you are trying to implement most of them here and I really liked the idea of badges (lets see :))
It might not be practical or wise to incorporate every other feature or option into DWQA but credits/ Points & Rewards is certanily the main item and will be the key for DWQA’s success. I agree with @nicopagel that it might be useful that while there are options for mycred.me to be integrated with DWQA, if there is s small function which can be enable/disabled as n option from the settings to provide the credit system for not so heavy usage.
There are user like me who would like the external implementation work as well, as this provides extensibility and future growth.

Hung Dinh
replied 10 years ago

Guru, your insights are solid! Thank you very much.

About the credit/point features, I also agree with you and @nicopagel Nico Pagel

The backlog of impliment a simple credits for DW Q&A are already brought up today with the team. Here is how we will bring credits/points system to DW

1. There will be a very simple points/credits features built into the core of DW Q&A

2. We will make sure it can be disable/enable or work seemlessly with popular points/badges system. We will start with MyCred and BadgeOS

I have not had an any estimate for the time this new feature will be released, but I dont think it take longer than 2 months from now.

We will be testing it on our own system before releasing to users. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get the updates .

Nico Pagel
answered 10 years ago

I know a very simple but effective point credit system from the wordpress q and a plugin by wpmu.org. It looks like this and would fit all my needs:  

  • define( ‘QA_ANSWER_ACCEPTED’, 15 );
  • define( ‘QA_ANSWER_ACCEPTING’, 2 );
  • define( ‘QA_ANSWER_UP_VOTE’, 10 );
  • define( ‘QA_QUESTION_UP_VOTE’, 5 );
  • define( ‘QA_DOWN_VOTE’, -2 );
  • define( ‘QA_DOWN_VOTE_PENALTY’, -1 );  

I thinks it’s obviously: the numbers are the points and the voting system is like yours.
The best thing is that there are also negative points for bad answers. (=

Nico Pagel
replied 10 years ago

By the way – I noticed a bug in your credit point system: when I edit and update an answer I get points again and again 😀

Hung Dinh
replied 10 years ago

Thank you Nico Pagel.
How do you compare wpmu.org credit system with other plugin like MyCred.me?

Also, wpmu.org also has a Q&A Plugin? Do you use that plugin? I would love to learn from others so we can improve ourselves

PS: Thank you for the bug report, it will be fixed in the next hour or so.

Nico Pagel
replied 10 years ago

The credit-system I metioned above belongs to the q and a plugin by wpmu.org (Link here: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/qa-wordpress-questions-and-answers-plugin/). By the way your plugin is far better than their but they have a simple but good pointing system integrated. I don't know about mycred.me but I think stackoverflow could also be a good example for a good credit system integrated in a q and a site.

Hung Dinh
replied 10 years ago

Nico, you are super fast 🙂

I don’t think implement a reputation into the core of Q&A is a good idea. It works for a simple Q&A but if you want to scale your community, points/Credits need to be used outside the Q&A

And to make other exciting things happen to your user like exchange for Badges, T-shirt or even buying things like membership, themes, plugins, integration with an independent credits system is the right way to do.

For example, we are testing WooCommerce to offer Paid membership subscription, and we be using $tone to award VIP membership for people who contribute support to others in our community. I don’t think the core pointing feature of WPmudev will be ready to WooCommerce integration

Nico Pagel
replied 10 years ago

I just thought about a credit system for a ranking in the community.

For exmaple you could create a shortcode to echo the people with most points.

This could be a reason to give good answers, being an active community member and so on.

I think a little inbuild point system would be nice feature.. Maybe for these poeple who just want to use your q and a plugin and no others like mycred.me.

You could perhaps make this feature as an alternative chosen by the users of your plugin and if someone decides to use it in combination with other credit systems that would work too.

How you can see in the Q and A plugin of wpmu.org it's only a small function to give people the points they should earn for beeing active ect.

So I hope you wil think about this too.

Although I know that your thoughts about a credit system are indeed good.

But for me a way bigger than I would need. So think about people like me too (=

Nico Pagel
replied 10 years ago

Btw. how do You implemend the credit point system at the moment? Perhaps you could give small function for people who just want their members earning some points to show their “knowledgebase”. (=

Jackie Lord
answered 10 years ago

CubePoint is another WordPress Pointing System Plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/cubepoints/. Anyone using this plugin for your WordPress site?

George Appiah
answered 10 years ago

I use myCred, and I use and love the built-in smooth integration with BuddyPress, Woocommerce, tribeEvents and bbPress plugins. The developer is very helpful, and I’m sure he won’t mind working with you on this. On another site I use Simple:Press forums, and the Simple:Press folks have their own integration with myCred as well.
CubePoints was the most popular and best featured point system (until myCred came along). But its been abandoned for a long time, and after several WordPress upgrades, CubePoints is broken in many places — and needs a lot of hacks to get it to work at all. A while back the developer posted on the WordPress forums that school work had taken his time off the plugin, and that he needs donations to return to work on the plugin.
Now myCred is the best there is that I know of — paid or free.

Hung Dinh
replied 10 years ago

Thank you very much for your information @George
We will be in touch with myCred team to fully support myCred integration into DW Q&A

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