Hey guys -
The original purpose of our influence system was to incentivize our members to become active, and to find a way to figure out who those members are that others deem to be influential, credible, and are overall leaders in the community at a point in time.

Unfortunately, from the start the system was flawed, and I can't tell you how many inane discussions I've had with people over the past few years about it.

We've spent far too much time trying to catch those people who simply manipulate the system for personal gain, and have created a system that is ultimately fairly meaningless.

While it is in our interest to create a system that rewards people that participate and help the site, I believe that as it currently stands, the point system is looked at as a negative by far more people than look at it positively.

So . . . I'm turning to you for your feedback.

I believe that we must redesign the point system from scratch and hopefully as a community, we can come up with ways to make something that works.

Here are my thoughts:
1 - Points need to reflect a user's activity and influence at a point in time, and as such, I believe we should find a way to depreciate these over time. If a user was very active and influential a year ago, but hasn't been on the site since, their points shouldn't be at the top of our charts -- it makes no sense.

2 - In order to incentivize ALL members - old and new alike - to strive to become "influential," they need to see that they can attain a "score" that ranks amongst the leaders. It is virtually impossible for a new member to rank in the top 10 influence points without doing a fair share of activities on the site that I'd deem to be manipulative of the system.

3 - We need to create a system that all but removes the ability for users to manipulate the system. Over the years, some of the activities people have utilized to game the system include:
a) Voting schemes in our bulletin and forum systems, where users would vote for one another to raise their influence.
b) Inviting and creating fake users on the site to gain referral influence.
c) Posting garbage in our forums, blog, and bulletin systems to gain points.
d) Starting topics just to get points.
e) and so on

4 - The current system doesn't have a way to distinguish between those people who post a lot and those people who post things that others find to be valuable. Can we find a way to incentivize quality contributions, but eliminate the ability to "cheat"?

5 - Should a new system take one's actual expertise into account? How would we go about doing that? Perhaps allowing people to tag other users as experts in specific areas would be a better way to go?

Additional thoughts:
Instead of making a single influence category, we break the system into different weighted categories to calculate an overall score that is simply on a 0-100 scale.

This could take into account things like: a) votes, b) some average pertaining to the number of times/categories the user is deemed an expert in c) contributions to the site (inviting members, posting, participating, sharing) d) trailing time period activity level (eg 1 month), e) testimonials, f) negative factors (violating the rules, spam, times a user is flagged by other members or some other negative 'handicap')

So, the most "influential" members would have a score closer to 100, while the least would be closer to zero. Everyone would compete on the same scale, making it more fair and creating an environment where everyone has a shot to be a leader.

Ultimately, the final algorithm would reflect those factors that matter, and someone who has been around for 3 months and someone on site for 5 years could have the same level of expertise in a fairer scoring model. It would truly be a reflection of both influence and credibility - something we desperately need.

I know that there is a lot to chew on here . . . any thoughts?

NOTE: We'll save a discussion on awards for another day . . . these should and would be reflective of the new influence system