Bienvenue everyone! So at the end of last week I made this fucking massive post outlining a project I put together for the WAYR posts. If you haven't seen it it's worth a look, but really it's a lot of fluff and computer sciency stuff explaining the simple fact that the WAYR threads are now gonna have statistics, leaderboards, and monthly competitions to go with them yay. Elsewhere in that same post I said I wanted to make a few threads here and there for the month of May talking about other aspects of the project I find interesting, fishing for feedback, or debuting as-yet-unseen features; this thread falls into the third category. With this post I'd like to show off and talk about one of the leaderboards, User Level.

Okay so User Level was a very simple add-on to an existing leaderboard module, so simple that I wasn't even sure if I should include it, but hey the more the merrier. This module keeps track of users who like going all out with their WAYR posts, taking a user's total character count for all posts from the entire year, dividing that by 1,000 and then flooring the decimal. To floor a decimal means that you round down 100% of the time; the floor value of 1.99999999 is still 1, which is a perfect application for levels. In any given video game your level does not round up once you've passed the halfway mark on your experience bar, you have to wait until the bar is full and then your level increments.

So, here's your top 10 for the year:

Leaderboard Stats: User Level
#1: /u/deathjohnson1....Level [112]
#2: /u/alwayslonesome...Level [54]
#3: /u/UnknownNinja.....Level [48]
#4: /u/PHNX_Arcanus.....Level [46]
#5: /u/fallenguru.......Level [33]
#6: /u/KaveAhangar......Level [29]
#7: /u/Some_Guy_87......Level [28]
#8: /u/Alexfang452......Level [25]
#9: /u/donuteater111....Level [22]
#10: /u/nanogenesis.....Level [22]

/u/deathjohnson1 takes the cake by a landslide, guy really likes writing down his thoughts (me too!). Like I said this module ended up just sprouting off of a much larger, more robust module, but it seemed charming enough to keep it in. There's not a lot to break down on this one, but there's a few facets of this data that are worth talking about. I'll start with a basic assumption I have about WAYRStats: The very existence of visible data gives incentive to an individual to interact with a system in ways the data specifically tracks. Have a leaderboard for comment replies, more comment replies happen. A leaderboard for most characters typed may bump up the average character count of posts. Some individuals may be completely unaffected by this phenomenon, others may obsess over it entirely, your mileage may vary. Working off that baseline we have the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Celebrates those users that go all-out on the WAYR threads (as they deserve to be)
• Promotes larger posts being made, facilitating more and more meaningful discussion
• Actually uses the term level to up competitive spirit (depends who you talk to)
• The Year-In-Total leaderboard debuting later in the year gives existing contributors a shout-out

Cons:

• Over-glorifying users who post large comments often may create a visible in-group that may actually discourage lurkers/less active users
• Going with the above it's very difficult to create statistics that expressly avoid rewarding those users, thus names will appear more often on more metrics
• Going with the above again seeing the same names across the top of all the leaderboards may communicate that top spots are impossible to get at this point

End of the day I do think it's a clever little module, being able to see your year-in-total character count is a nice reminder of the effort you put into those posts. Around the time of writing this post, however, another idea struck me to build an actual level system for users based on how many of all the metrics they meet as opposed to singular character count. The pro of this one is that it's an amazing holistic metric that can shine light on users who are doing a little across the entire board rather than doing a lot for one specific leaderboard metric. The con? It will be a nightmare to implement. I'd have to introduce data structures that are persistent throughout all modules of the leaderboard code, something that is not hard in and of itself, but the hard part is then determining a fair weight to give different metrics as they add towards your total score. I don't mean to discourage or say this is not possible; if anything I will probably add that metric on top of this existing one.

So what do you think? Good module? Needs updating? Go with the rework? I'm killing the WAYR threads? Let me know!