Old HotW Thread

[Cobble]

You're a hero to me <3


I think it just goes to show how much of a perfectionist I am when it comes to threads and coding projects.

I agree, the Hero of the Week contest was poorly executed and became a popularity contest.  Some of the things said in the voting threads about other members were kind of horrendous.  Often times, these members would end up winning the next round and would never see the things said about them, as a mod would move the voting thread out of Hero's Peak ASAP.

That's part of the reason why I didn't set up a version of HotW on this site.  It was a staple of JV, sure, but it was not something to cherish as one of the better parts of JV.  No one is "better" than anyone else, and HotW promoted that hierarchy and gave winners an inflated social status to enjoy.  I was always conscious of how I behaved after I won to make sure I wasn't giving in to the stigma of the elitism among the winners. I can only hope that no one thought that I was looking down on the people who didn't win, as that would never have been my intention.

It was part of a larger pattern. You get it all over again if you enable status games the way you're doing now.

This page is a microcosm of bad incentives.
You've got ten roles with seven different colors. You're setting up a ranking that goes from "registering" to "making a lot of posts" to "getting a contest approved" to "donating money" to "becoming staff" to "being bls1999". You're encouraging people to care about this ranking, whether that's your intention or not.

You inserted a referral link instead of just a link to the register page because you're treating a high referral count as an end unto itself. You put a top referrers ranking on the front page so nobody forgets who the important people are.

If you want this community to be healthy you need to cut that out.
Don't put rankings of any kind on the front page or really any page that isn't dedicated to rankings.
Don't list thank counts anywhere other than people's profiles.
Keep at most two username colors for registered users, for regular users and for forum moderators, because there's some practical benefit to being able to see who can help you with administrative stuff but the rest is only useful for bragging purposes.
Don't call people with 200 posts "ultimate members". It would help to just say that people with more than 200 posts can change their usernames, without giving it a special name. Many people on JV actually cared about being an ultimate member™, and that's terrible. They wouldn't care as much if it was just the ability to change your username and user title, without status attached to it.
If you want to get an icon don't turn it into a contest. Ask people for suggestions, then do a quick poll in the same thread. You'll get the same results without the drama and status games.
Don't make contests all official with a formal approval process and whatever it was that JV had going on. You don't have to lower the standards, you just need to avoid making it into a status thing.

Acknowleding how bad HotW was is good, but JV had enormous structural problems that you're copying.