I fully admit we've dropped the ball on doing Totally Random on a weekly, or even monthly basis at this point. It was quite a lot of work to put that video together and it was trying to accomplish too many things at once, and doing kinda a weird mediocre job at all of them.

In the new year we will be bringing back all the elements that went into totally random, including the karma prizes, in individual ways that really make sense.. So karma prizes will award licenses to people automatically on a weekly basis. News will be in a news format people can actually follow, and culture stuff like us jerkin around in PDX will end up in a spot where that might actually promote the project.

I tell you all of that to just point out the karma system is not trash and a joke. It took time to build. It's not perfect, but it's pretty keen and outside of the prizes people will eventually be winning again it really helps casual and newbie visitors qualify the value of the advice they're getting from members in the community.

Why anyone would bother to game the karma system escapes me. Its a little like taking candy from a baby. Let me just be clear, if you start a thread, you have the right to choose an official answer to it. We built that because we wanted to capture threads that might get turned into FAQs and improve search results one day. We decided to give people some karma points to the thread owner for picking an official answer, and the answer giver for having the answer that was picked as well. It seemed like the perfect way to motivate people to bother to come back and tell us what helped.

We also decided it functionally made sense to let people change the official answer. If someone comes along with a better reply, so be it!

Now what we didn't do is track to see if an answer for a thread had already been picked, and then NOT award additional karma points for it. This means you can start a thread, post to it, have your friend post to it, and then just pick official answers back and forth and back and forth to rack up points.

On the scale of clever hacks, I'm giving this about a 1.5 out of 10. Ker-duh. The reason you can do this is because we're three guys in a drafty room trying to run the core, trying to run concrete5.org, and trying to continually add new and interesting features that might benefit the project and push it beyond what others are doing. That's a good part of why we're listed as the fastest growing developer community in this awesome whitepaper on CMS's that just came out (yay!)

http://bit.ly/gN2w6K

Part of what comes out of a highly iterative development process like this is we try to assume the best out of our user base when we can. Our eCommerce add-on is nicely locked down and we took the time to worry about junk like this. For a karma system on an open source community site? The feedback loop hack seemed like a passable thing to launch as long as we didn't give out cash prizes for points.

Happily, we're not morons, so we did make the entire karma board results completely open source and viewable by anyone in the my karma area. Any points awarded are there for everyone to see and wonder about. We also were clever enough to give ourselves the power to assign negative karma points for any reason we wanted.

Ain't karma a b!tch?

Lets get back to helping one another, perhaps lets make some more good stuff for the marketplace that might make us all a little change? Keep screwing around with this hack and I'll just stop assigning points to anyone for it until we launch a fix.