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azurelunatic) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_suggestions2010-06-28 10:51 pm
Community points
Title:
Community points
Area:
communities, points, great ideas that could go badly wrong
Summary:
It could be interesting to allow communities to receive points, and to allow community admins to distribute points belonging to the community.
Description:
So yesterday I decided to hand out a few of the points that I happened to have on hand, and since it was related to a community sort of thing, I wondered if it would be possible to hand them out through the community. Of course, I then learned that one can't do this through a community -- one may only give points to an active personal journal (which, incidentally, means no giving points to OpenID users).
This could be great if people wanted to give points to a community to perhaps contribute toward a paid community, or for the administrators of that comm to give out as they saw fit, say to community members who contributed to the community, or as prizes, or what have you.
This could be seriously problematic, of course, if one admin of the community saw fit to transfer all the community's points to one of their spare accounts in the night and run overseas (or at least stop answering their e-mail). Or give them all to a friend. And when real money gets involved, drama can be right behind sometimes.
Do the possibilities for good outweigh the possibilities for evil?
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
15 (33.3%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
13 (28.9%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
9 (20.0%)
(I have no opinion)
5 (11.1%)
(Other: please comment)
3 (6.7%)
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I wouldn't want it implemented without records; it should have timestamps, the admin who made the transfer, the person who got the transfer. (Also records of incoming.)
If things ever get switched to owner-admin-moderator, the owner should be the one who gets to manage any community points balance. If owners then get to hand out a la carte admin rights, they would then in theory only be able to hand it to people they could trust to work well with it.
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Also, some mechanism should be set up for expiry. I.e., what happens if a gazillionty-seven points are donated to a comm, and the mod goes dark and leaves them sitting there? Those points are effectively dead unless some mechanism is in place to rationally transfer control. I'd recommend opints get used FIFO, and any points more than X months old are refunded. Details would need fine-tuning (user donates points, then deletes journal?), but could be worked out during the spec process.
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Also, not to sound callous about the disposition of money spent by users, but points that remain unused (like points that are in the possession of a user when they delete and thereafter become purged) are to the financial benefit of the company (though users deleting themselves are not to the company's benefit). Though I imagine that the owners are not looking to have this happen, because of how having active and not deleted users is a good thing.
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Plus this sort of thing would be an iterated behaviour dispute, if an admin abused what is effectively other peoples money, their rep would plummet a lot faster than an admin having an argument with another admin.
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There may very well be drawbacks to that that I'm not seeing.
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On the other hand, if it can be set up so only one mod of a community has responsibility for points - maybe with the owner-admin-mod setup that's been mooted - it might work. I can certainly see the potential good side, too.
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The other belated-realization insight of the ways this could go wrong -- I know that on LJ, pay-to-become-a-member communities are amazingly against the Terms of Service. Something like this would make that easier, although it could in theory already be done by transferring points to an admin.
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Yes. Mine is a gut feeling, and as such not really defensible. I agree, since points can't readily be converted into actual cash the scale of potential abuse is limited. So maybe this is okay.
But I'd really want to see some kind of safeguards. The way communities were offering points for participation during the threeweeks fest was great; I didn't take part, but I thought it was a wonderful idea, and a great way to raise funds for DW. So I can completely see where the suggestion is coming from.
But...what if there were some kind of worst-case scenario with this? Say a lot of fans donate points to a community fund for some fest, enough that you're talking some serious money, and then those points are effectively 'stolen' by one of the mods. Would that not potentially put Dreamwidth in conflict with a payment processor again? I mean, if people are angry enough to chargeback those payments? I assume DW can simply trace and reverse the points transfer but fandom can get kinda irrational about things like that.
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My gut feeling is that in the case of at least minor points-conflict between users, that for sanity's sake, Dreamwidth's policy is going to be, and going to have to be, that you transfer points to another user at your own risk, transferring points cannot for policy reasons be undone once you have done it, so do not transfer points to a user until the time you think is appropriate to transfer said points, and be wary of third parties who offer to make a transfer for you, because they can scarper with the points at any time. (And once the points are in someone's possession, one can't track them to their origin like one can with serial numbers on bills.) So if say 2/3 of the pool of points get siphoned off for private use, and 1/3 actually goes to the agreed-upon recipient(s), there's no way to tell whose points get refunded. If indeed DW did agree to trace and refund, because I believe there are only the two Terms of Service Enforcement contractors, and for sanity's sake I really don't see the owners allowing Dreamwidth to become an arbiter in transactions, even transactions in its own currency.
And that is where I see the potential for harm -- I'm not particularly thinking that chargebacks would be a problem -- as I understand it, one buys Dreamwidth Points through the shop, which are delivered unto you, and then what you do with them afterwards is your business -- I would imagine that a credit card company, upon hearing that you charged $50 worth of arcade tokens to your credit card, and the arcade company handed over the tokens, and then later in the day you wanted to get $20 of tokens over to your little brother and some guy in the arcade offered to take them for you, and then instead of delivering the tokens, walked off with them -- I would imagine that the credit card company would not be very likely to actually go through with that chargeback.
However, the damage I'm worried about now, given a scenario like that, is in reputation. You head up to the counter and complain "There was this guy, he offered to take my tokens to my little brother, but he plain walked off with them!" and the arcade staff says "Dude, why the hell did you give your tokens to some guy to give to your little brother? There's nothing we can do about that!" ... and you walk off disgruntled, and tell all your friends and the whole internet: "Yeah, I was just at Whizz-Bopp Arcade, and I gave some guy my tokens, and even though it was $20 worth of tokens, the arcade didn't do anything when he walked off with them and didn't give them to the person I said he was supposed to give them too! Even though they have security cameras and everything and they could have seen who he was and found him!"
And people being people, some of them are going to say "Look, you idiot, why did you give $20 worth of tokens to some strange guy, you idiot?" but some of them, who may have had a bad vibe about the arcade already, might decide that even though they like the games there, it's not worth it if the owners won't do anything to discourage the rampant confidence tricksters operating under its roof.
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The other belated-realization insight of the ways this could go wrong -- I know that on LJ, pay-to-become-a-member communities are amazingly against the Terms of Service. Something like this would make that easier, although it could in theory already be done by transferring points to an admin.
I don't know if this is against ToS on DW (if it's not, the entire point is moot, but anyway), I think the nature of the point system makes pay to become a member communities unlikely. With the points, all you can do with them is buy things on DW, not convert them to real cash and take it away.
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Perhaps only to one named mod, and have the "points administered by X" displayed on the screen?
Regardless, I think it'd be good. Plus I'd personally feel less guilty about receiving points from a comm I was active in than from an individual person I don't know.
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Exactly. Once you transfer these points, you have given them away and no longer have a say in their use.
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Other things that came to mind:
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