Community points

[azurelunatic]

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?

Poll #3656 Community points

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 45

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

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%)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

If that were how things were implemented, I would like to also have a cutoff ability/cutoff point, the point after which transferring in points becomes Excessively Silly -- say your community's premium paid for the next 5 years, and you still have a stack of community points you can't touch.

[coraa]

Perhaps there could be a mechanism by which the mods could return the points to the people who donated them? Not to anyone else, just to the original donors. Sort of a, "Thanks, but we're paid up for the next ten years, so you can give this to someone who needs it" thing.

There may very well be drawbacks to that that I'm not seeing.

[azurelunatic]

The only obvious drawback I'm seeing there is drama potential -- how come you returned her points and not mine, etc., but that's ... I'm not sure how you get a technological solution to that one.

[phi]

easily: have points spent on paid time (or other future community features) be taken randomly from the pool of points available. When a mod wants to refund points, they only get to say how many points they want to refund. The software then randomly selects points from the pool to send back to the original donor(s).

[azurelunatic]

This seems to assume that there's tracking of the origin of points once they're transferred over to the community, above and beyond a simple ledger of in-and-out.

[cesy]

+1

[saekhwa]

+1