What's The Point In Points?

Question

Although I set up an account here pretty much as soon as it began, I'm quite new to this new forum. Its being saying that people have a certain amount of 'points'. I was wandering if you can actually use the points for anything, or if they're just to show how many questions you've answered, because I can't see a purpose for them at the moment.

Sorry that it wasn't really related to twine, I was just wondering.

Answer 1

As far as I know, they're just ordinary fake Internet points, that is, its meant to represent a sort of reputation system, where more active / helpful members have more points. I imagine its meant to help users determine who to trust in the case of multiple conflicting answers, but Twine is simple enough that you can generally try each answer yourself anyway, and the community is small enough that you can probably get a sense of who knows what they're doing (and who doesn't) just by poking around, regardless of points. This whole Q&A system is based on an open source implementation of Stack Exchange, so you can look at their docs for more info.

Comments

There's also the fact that people get points for asking questions, so I have a thousand points despite not understanding what I'm doing at any given moment, so that's a little weird. I do hope that there becomes a point to them, tho I don't know what it would be.

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I personally see the Points as another of the meaningless things found on some websites which I automatically ignore**, and in the case of this particular site it also has a Answer Vote system which seems more meaningful as it allows people to indicate the answers they found more helpful thus potentially more 'correct'.

(** I generally do the same with Likes systems, but then I'm not that social to begin with. *smile*)