What's the point of points?

And for those that are interested here's how to become a gold dot in a month (ok a bit of an exaggeration) :

1. Post a H/VH review

2. Spend 6 hours reading, over-rating and leaving gushy comments on every review you can find.

3. Spend the next 2 days leaving even gushier welcome to Ciao comments in every new reviewers guest book (guaranteed to get you tonnes of trust)

4. Read, VH, and leave a gushy comment on every new review.

5. Post another H/VH review every day (if you follow points 2-4 your virtually guaranteed to get 50-100 reads per review)

There you go, zillions of CP in the first month.


***Disclaimer****

This is intended to show how pointless points are, and is not the correct way to use the site.

But those people are making the community strong. That is a good thing. People wanting to know how to behave on the site should look to the gold and silver dots for inspiration. If they've become disallusioned then newbies will look to other gold and silver dots.

DanielsMother wrote:

But those people are making the community strong. That is a good thing. People wanting to know how to behave on the site should look to the gold and silver dots for inspiration. If they've become disallusioned then newbies will look to other gold and silver dots.

You are joking aren't you? Let's get something straight, I "know" an awful lot of metallic dots and one thing most of us have in common, is we stay out of the community as much as possible. We've been through the excited newcomer stage, and have realised that all the chummy, chummy stuff isn't all that good for the consumer (or us). Yes we post, read, rate etc. but as that's all most of us do, we're very unlikely to even hit the "newbies" radar.

Ok then some gold dots aren't living up to expectations, but some gold dots have been very helpful at helping newbies. If the gold and silver dots behaved as they should then the dots would be very good for newbies. You can't blame the system if people are behaving badly.

Yes you can blame the system if it's as fundamentally flawed as the CP system

DanielsMother wrote:

Ok then some gold dots aren't living up to expectations, but some gold dots have been very helpful at helping newbies. If the gold and silver dots behaved as they should then the dots would be very good for newbies. You can't blame the system if people are behaving badly.

Yes, you can blame the system.

And to be fair, any colour of dot can be helpful, but then they can also be unhelpful. It spans the dot spectrum and is why one particular dot colour shouldn't carry more weight than another.

We can agree to disagree but Ciao think I'm right or they wouldn't have dots.

It's what writers want as well but the payments have been going down and down, until premium fund pays nothing. Disheartening to say the least.

sirg0508 wrote:

Dots mean nothing - someone could write 1,000 Helpful reviews, gain around 20 reads per review - that's 60,000 community points without even reading any reviews!

That's the sort of thing some people do, they churn out a load of short and 'helpful' (at best) reviews and whizz their way through the dots only because they write a lot of nothing, it doesn't mean they are going to be of any help to anybody, just that they want to get a posh dot. It's like some forums that have ranks according to how many messages you write, they don't mean anything other than telling everybody you spend a lot of time on that forum.

Is Ciao using community points as a reward? They don't pay anything, do they?

If somebody's review gets rated SH or lower, which give minus points, it doesn't take money away from their account. Or does it?

CPs would work if they were given for truely worth-while things. Getting points for writing "good op" really doesn't cut the mustard.

sirg0508 wrote:

Ratings i.e. SH and below will take community points away from you and not reward you any money...

But I thought you were paid for 'member reads', the same as on Dooyoo, even though it probably works out less per read.

Does it say anywhere that a rating of SH or less doesn't pay?

sirg0508 wrote:

You don't get paid for reads on Ciao - you get paid per rate.

All you get for a read is 2 CPs.

So you can have loads of member reads and get loads of points but no money!

I really thought it went on member reads, because that's what's listed next to the review.

It seems rather complicated!

So, the reward might only be points, which give you a coloured dot and that's it!

Hmmm. I knew about the CP thing, but still can't find anything out about not getting paid for £'d categories if there are loads of reviews.

A slight aside - I did find this:

Ciao wrote:

Why doesn't Ciao publish the algorithm used in calculating Premium Fund earnings?
The Premium Fund is, for the most part, automatically shared out. Various quality measures are taken into account, such as the length of the review, the author’s objectivity and the level of interest which (s)he demonstrates. Please understand that, in the interests of avoiding abuse and bias, we cannot make the exact selection process public.

So the length does matter...

I'd have thought that's just for the number of £ on the category...

You're wrong Debbie. If you've written a review in a category with a ££, then you'll get paid 1p a VH/H rate, regardless of where you are in the rankings. As more reviews are added, Ciao tend to downgrade the ££ to £ or even nothing, but every review in the category (except the first) will get the same amount of dosh at any one time.

I'm sure Phil (as in LostWitness fame - hope he doesnt mind me quoting him!) once said that after he got a certain amount of reads he stopped getting paid - and ciao confirmed this to him.

But then I could be remembering that incorrectly

This is very very interesting. I haven't earned anything in a long while and wonder if I am at my stop off point.

I meant on a review - not overall!

Haha, see how easy it is to misread what people write on the internet. I thought it was weird that my earnings stopped and must clarify that point about cut offs with ciao and see why though, because this is the slowest the account has ever been. I even thought I would earn more money as a white dot.

I'm sure I recently got paid for a read from a review written a long time ago. I shall keep my eye open in future!