The score service is the glue that holds other core services together and creates meaningful comparisons between them. It is used by services (such as like or rating) to measure content value. The service “listens” for events such as a blog post rating or a new page view, then recalculates the scores they relate to. The service is also used to maintain the integrity of the community by reporting abuse (abuse reporter score) and evaluating it (abuse creator score).
Telligent Community Server 9.0 has two widgets that list and group users on the basis of quality scores and allow community members to click through to profiles, mentions, and groups:
- The high-quality authors in a group are listed by the Group - Members List widget configured for sorting by group author quality score.
- Groups in which the author is a top-quality author are listed in the Users - Top Quality Author groups widget.
Scores and metrics
The score service measures, using metrics and score modifiers such as weight and decay, content quality; author quality, and member engagement with content. Score metrics can be added or removed and weighted according to community requirements. For example, a Content Quality score is partly derived from metrics such as bookmarks; comments; downloads; featuring; forum replies; likes; ratings; suggested answers; tags; user subscriptions; verified answers, and views. The relative weight, or importance, of a metric within a score is configurable on a sliding scale (from less to more). For example in a gaming community, you might want to weight the download and like metrics more heavily (that is, higher on the "more" end of the slider) than you weight views.
The screen capture below shows the slider in the "normal" range, which is the default for all metric weights.
Decay is another component in scores. This tool is designed to counter content stagnation by reducing scores over time. Using decay, older content could have lower scores than newer content and thus newer content would place higher in search results. If you enable decay, it uses a value called half life to determine when the score is automatically reduced. For example, a forum post that initially received a high content quality score would have that score reduced by 1/2 after it has aged to the specified half life. The default decay half life is 30 days, but this can be changed.
Please note that metric weight can only be set at the site level for the entire community; it's not configurable at the group or application level. For example, you might want to age author quality more slowly (thus setting a longer half life - such as 90 days) than you would age content quality (by specifying a lower half life number such as 30 days).
Development
The score service is part of the core functionality of this release. For information about developing with the service, please see the IScore plugin type and this article. It's still applicable in 9.0.
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