Help! Users are gaming my point system -- what advice do you have?

  • 1 April 2024
  • 5 replies
  • 51 views
DannyPancratz
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Userlevel 6
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Oh the irony…

  1. On Wednesday, I presented a webinar about recognition helping super charge gamification and unlocking contributions. 
  2. On Thursday, I discovered that some users were exploiting our points system. We gave 1 point for liking a post; they were going back years and liking every post to earn themselves points. 
    • I adjusted our point system accordingly, no longer issuing a point for users giving a like to a post
  3. Today, I discovered that after I told our users about the change, a few of them started exploiting a remaining loophole:  liking each other’s posts to earn each other points. 

this is the first time I’ve had to cross this bridge… any advice? 

My current plan is to leverage the best practice of “celebrate in public, correct in private” and to revisit our community guidelines, tighten them up, and find ways to monitor for outliers and exploitation of points system that works great (when not actively exploited). 

5 replies

matthew_lind
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While I don’t know if this is even technically possible, I do like the idea of capping points earned per day, or via a certain motion per day. For example, liking posts caps out at 10 points per day. This still encourages the “traditional” user to engage with content, but closes the door somewhat on racking up points using motions that ultimately add little value.

Making people their best....currently disguised as a CS Ops Architect. How can I contribute to your success?
DannyPancratz
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Userlevel 6
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@matthew_lind very interesting idea. I like it a lot. 

Based on some things I’ve done in the past, there’s probably a combination of tracking likes, adding a custom role, and third party scripts that could automate the actual hiding of the like function after so many a day. That type of solution wouldn’t close the loophole entirely, but add enough friction to make it too difficult to be worth the effort. 

I appreciate the help. 

DannyPancratz
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Userlevel 6
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After thinking a bit, I think there’s a way a less disruptive solution. 

  1. Adjust the T&C and community guidelines
  2. Automate like tracking
    1. From who to whom
    2. Date 
    3. group by day, week, month 
  3. Automate alerts when certain thresholds hit
    1. Notify me via slack
    2. Look into it manually (shouldn’t be many)
    3. Reach out and address the issue with the users if/when necessary
  4. Monthly - Quick Monitoring Analysis
    1. Who received the most likes
    2. Which users’ profile pages were viewed the most (via Google Analytics)
    3. Anything look suspicious there? 

I estimate I can do this via Zapier with about 2000 tasks a month, which we luckily have plenty of cushion to accommodate in our usage/plan. If usage gets troublesome, we have Workato as well and can likely move to there. 

It’s a combination of three strategies I really believe in: 

  1. Strong community guidelines / set clear expectations ← obviously haven’t done a good enough job there yet
  2. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” - Catch the issues quickly, address them quickly 
  3. “Celebrate in public, correct in private.” - Catching it early allows the correction to be earlier and avoid it becoming a more challenging conversation. 

That’s my plan as of EOD, but I’d still love advice from others in the community! Especially around how to correct behavior / address violations of guidelines, etc. 

Jef Vanlaer
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Userlevel 5
Badge +1

We are still setting up our community, but had a discussion about this last week. Of course, we hope Community members won't game the system (what do they have to gain anyways?), but everybody still feels it could happen (and this post proves it does).

@DannyPancratz I see you are sharing the details of the system system with the Community members (which action brings in how many points; what do you need to do to get a certain rank?). Do you think it would help to only explain it in general terms?

Kenneth R
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Userlevel 5
Badge +4

That’s interesting @DannyPancratz !  A long time ago when I was running B2C communities I remember we intentionally used to exclude metrics that can be easily manipulated, such as likes.  I don’t think this happens very often in SaaS communities, but there also aren’t many SaaS communities with as advanced a gamification design as yours (and therefore the motivation for some users to game the system). 

My personal recommendation would probably be to keep things simple and do as I used to do, by simply excluding both the giving and receiving of likes within the points and ranks systems.  Liking is a kind of engagement, of course, but generally I’ve not found them to signify anything particularly meaningful or worthy of incentivization (sometimes in those large B2C communities I’ve even see that they are most heavily used by detractors wanting to highlight negative posts). 

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