Last week we rolled out a a major update to our scoring system. Along with the points that we’ve had for months, we introduced a 1-100 scale that ranks your account in relation to other And Me Accounts on the site. After a week of close monitoring, we’re back with some exciting new scoring updates.
During our last update, we tweaked the level of points that users received for an upvoted comment. Today, we’re rolling out the ability for high ranking users to downvote a comment and have that vote actually affect the permanent user score. Just how many points depends on how high ranking the user is, but we’ve now got a few tiers in place where saying something stupid or rude might actually cost you your account points.
The ultimate goal here is to raise the overall discussion quality on the site and to hopefully highlight some of the most influential users. To that end, we now mark all anonymous comments as guest. We’ve also disabled Gravatars for guests, so if you’d like a proper user picture, you’ll need to sign up for an And Me Account. Registering is free and takes about ten seconds (really).
For those of you with an account already (or who have freshly signed up), you’ll notice our login area has moved to the top right of the site. There you’ll find your user picture and percentile rank, along with links to edit your profile or logout. If you’re not logged in, you’ll see a Log In button (of course).
If you’re an especially keen user, you’ll notice that the Edit Profile page is all new. We’ve restyled everything and added a few fancy new options, like the ability to link a Twitter account. Soon, having a Twitter account linked will unlock some awesome new features around the site (plus we’ll absolutely NEVER tweet without your permission). For now though, linking your Twitter account will just display a handy link on your And Me profile page.
Along with improvements for the And Me Accounts, we’re also happy to be starting with a new advertising partner today. More details will soon follow.
If you haven’t caught our drift here yet, we’ve got a lot of exciting things in store for this site. We’ve got a handful of new scoring and community features still to be unleashed, and we can’t wait to share them with you guys.
