Becoming a PHP Master (Part 2): Reputation

Contents

Becoming a PHP Master with Publicly Visible Reputation

The New Reputation System

Demonstration Video

The Meaning of the Action Reputation Points

Multiple Types of PHP Reputation

Other Users Reputation

Future Features

Participate in the Future Developments

Becoming a PHP Master with Publicly Visible Reputation

As you progress in your career as a PHP developer, it is expected that you learn new things, increase your skills and gain expertise. That is the usual path for qualifying to work on better jobs that are eventually more rewarding in terms of your satisfaction as well as in terms of your income.

You may become an expert as PHP develop but if others are not aware of your expertise, you may not be able to be recognized as an expert as you deserve.

You need to act in a way that others can see how qualified you are and reckon your expertise. This means that you need to do everything you can to obtain public reputation and be seen as a skilled PHP developer.

The New Reputation System

The PHP Classes site was created explicitly to give visibility to the work of PHP developers that expose it here. Since the beginning, the site provides several ways to show your work with information that hints the site users about the reputation of your work.

Last year the site launched a system of missions and levels to guide authors of classes through a series of tasks that help them to improve their participation and get more visibility and recognition for that.

Today the site is launching a new feature that is intended to make your reputation as PHP developer more visible and explicit.

This new feature is a reputation system that keeps track of all the good actions that you do on the site. The site records all the actions and assigns points to the users according to the importance of each action.

The total number of points is displayed at the top of all pages for logged users inside a yellow button. That button may show question marks if your reputation points were not yet computed.

Clicking on the yellow will lead you to your reputation details page on which it is displayed the updated amount of reputation points.

Demonstration Video

Watch this video for a demonstration about what you should see.

Play Video

The Meaning of the Action Reputation Points

The main action that the site tracks and assigns points is of authors that submit their packages and have them downloaded by users. For each distinct user that downloads a package the author earns 1 point.

If a user downloads a package of an author multiple times, it still only counts 1 point. If a user downloads multiple packages of the same author, it also still only counts 1 point.

The points assigned to other actions consider the relative importance of those actions when compared to an equal number of users having downloaded packages of an author.

Take a look at the reputation types by action page to view a list of all actions that are currently supported and how many points they are worth.

Present and Past Actions

For most types of actions, each user earns reputation points immediately when actions are executed. For instance, when a package you submitted is published, you immediately earn 100 points. If for some reason your approved package is removed, you lose 100 points.

Some actions are executed so frequently that the respective amount of points cannot be assigned immediately. That is a measure to avoid overloading the site.

That is the case of the action that accounts users that download a package that you published. In that case the points are computed only once a day. The total number of points is updated then.

Multiple Types of PHP Reputation

Many types of user actions are tracked by the site, like for instance the packages you publish, packages by others that you rate, how frequently you visit the site, etc.. But it would not be right mix all actions and consider them to be of only one type of generic reputation.

Therefore the site distinguishes each action sorting them by types of reputation. You can see the total amount of reputation points just by dragging the mouse over the yellow reputation button.

Currently several types of reputation and considered:

• Class author: actions related to the classes you submit like publishing the class, being nominated for the innovation award, writing blog posts about your classes, etc..

• Article author: actions that consist in writing interesting articles for the site blog or product reviews.

• Reviewer: actions about evaluating the work of other users like rating a package, voting on a nominee for the innovation award, having voted on a nominee that became the winner of the month of the innovation award, etc..

• Evangelist: actions about promoting the site content and grow the site community, like recommending a new user to come to the site, or when a recommended user publishes a new package, etc..

• Experience: actions that reflect the experience you earned using the site like accessing the site in different days, comment on the site blogs and forums, etc..

Some reputation types are not yet fully supported. You may check all those that are supported in your reputation by type page.

Other Users Reputation

The user reputation information is public. This means that you can see the reputation of other users that perform publicly visible actions.

For instance, if you want to see the reputation of an author that submitted packages to the site, you can go on the respective author page and click on the Reputation link on the author information navigation bar.

Future Features

The whole reputation system is awesome but it took a long time to develop. Despite it was developed and tested with the help of some beta testers, it was about time to open it to the public, so everybody can enjoy and help testing it further.

Therefore, there are planned features that were left to be implemented in the future. Here are some of them.

Support for More Actions

Reputation Rankings

Redeeming Points to Earn Privileges

Reputation points can be useful just to see how you are doing but that would be a very limited use if you cannot do anything else with the points you earn.

One of the goals of the reputation system is to encourage users to do more of the good actions that are appreciated by the whole site community. Therefore it is planned to allow users redeem the points they earned by getting special privileges of their choice.

The complete list of privileges to be implemented is not yet fully determined but it will include things like getting exclusive access to certain new features, having special statistics about your site participation, or special moderation powers that will allow users to act upon bad content, etc..

Participate in the Future Developments

The reputation system is just one more step to make the participation of the site more rewarding and fun. Other features listed above are planned to be implemented.

Some beta testers will be able to try the new features before everybody else. If you are interested you can also participate in the beta testing phase, what you need to do is to perform as many good actions to gather as much reputation as possible. The top reputed users of the latest times will get invitations to participate in the beta testing phase.

Meanwhile, if you have a question or a comment to make about this initiative, post a comment about this article here.