Composr Supplementary: Composr Points Explained

Configuring point scoring

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It's fairly common that many forums utilise a rank system based on forum posts, which works fine for simple forums, but it doesn't reward users for interacting with the rest of the site. Where Composr excels is its fully integrated nature and this makes it an unbeatable base for a community based site.

One drawback with basing someone's rank solely on the number of forum posts is it doesn't reward quality content and is open to abuse. This could be through repeated posting of poor value posts. Some forum software allows you to impose minimum post lengths, but this doesn't really solve the problem or help reward community members for interacting with other parts of your site.

How does Composr differ?

Composr utilities a points system instead of a posts system. Where a forum might have 100 posts to ascend to rank 2, Composr might have 100 points to ascend to rank 2. The difference is because Composr allows you to set the number of points awarded for each type of interaction.

For many sites the forum will be the main place someone will interact, but you might want to encourage your users to make use of the inbuilt chat facility. To do this you could increase the points reward for each message posted in the chatroom. A Photo sharing site could also offer more points for uploading photos and albums. You can even reward users for logging in each day.

The benefit of this system over the simple "more posts equal higher rank" system is that you can tailor how valuable each type of interaction is.

To tailor the points on your site you need to navigate to the points section which can be found under Admin Zone > Setup > Configuration > Points options.

You can now determine how fast certain actions reward your users with a higher rank and with a higher rank you can give them more privileges on your site (via usergroups and permissions).

What else can points be used for?

As well as utilising points for site ranks and permissions, Composr allows users to spend points in the eCommerce system for the products you've configured with points-based pricing. The eCommerce allows you to offer rewards for your users to spend the points they earn from interacting with your site.

The eCommerce inventory management screen can be found under Admin Zone > Setup > eCommerce inventory management.

You can set the cost for users uploading banners, for highlighting their name in the forum, or for pinning topics among other things. You can also add more items which can be purchased such as more enhanced permissions and products. You can also edit any existing configured items.

How do your users purchase the products?

The Purchasing module is linked onto the default menus on the front-end of your site, or can be found in the Sitemap.

Go and try out all of the points & eCommerce options and see what works best for you. It offers a great amount of customisability which you simply don't get from simple posts to rank systems.

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