677799 - "Karma" system for automatically upgrading user permissions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: User management, task)

Description

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

In our user interview, Sheppy noted that it would be very helpful if the site automatically upgraded user permissions.

"I would like to have the ability to automate the upgrading of users. For example, a user signs up and has very limited permissions, like editing text only. After a couple of weeks this user is automatically granted permission to start attaching graphics. Editing text and attaching images is about 99% of what most people will ever need to do, but our biggest spam problem comes from people who sign up and immediately attach ads and the like. By adding an automatic week or two-week delay before they get permission that, a lot of our spam problem could be eliminated."

Later, Sheppy discussed the possibility of having categories of users. He didn't draw an explicit connection between categories and a "karma" system, but I do think a connection is possible.

"This category of user is allowed to upload these additional types of files, admins can upload anything, that kind of thing. By having that ability we can really expand the amount of stuff that can be done while also protecting reasonably well against people who are using the MDN for web hosting."

Sheppy also discussed how such a karma system could be useful to reviewers:

"[A user's reputation] could be used to judge user reliability. I watch the 'Recent Changes' feed and look over every single change that's made to the Wiki. Over time, I get to recognize usernames of users that are reliable, and I tend to skim past their contributions. We could use a liking system to help part-time reviewers recognize when a user is generally reliable."

Sheppy: You noted that you do not know of any sites that automatically upgrade user permissions. As it happens, Stack Overflow does something very similar (see http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation). Whether or not you have played around with Stack Overflow in the past, what do you think of this system?

Comment 1

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

I am going to mark this as low priority for now. This would be great to have, but a huge undertaking. I think we should implement more manual permission control before we take this on.

If we later decide that a karma system would be worthwhile, we can have the existing permissions (like bug 665743 and bug 665745) hook into it.

Thoughts?

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Bumping the priority to P4, as some other features depend on an engine like this.

Comment 3

[Janet Swisher]

I'm currently reading "Building Web Reputation Systems" (http://www.amazon.com/Building-Reputation-Systems-Randy-Farmer/dp/059615979X/). I'll have more to say about this when I'm done.

Comment 5

[Alex M]

Re. existing sites doing this sort of thing - Wikipedia (and most other MediaWiki-based sites) have additional rights granted based on number of edits / account age - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AUTOC

Comment 6

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.