Telligent Enterprise 4.0's new score service “listens” for events such as a blog post rating or a page view increment, and recalculates related scores. The score social service supports social engagement in the community by compiling user and content data and applying configurable variables that reflect your community's values to the data.
Social service
- The score service is utilized by other services (including like or rating) to measure value of content in the context of social engagement.
- The score service is part of the core functionality of this release.
Social engagement
Scores measure (by means of metrics and modifying factors such as weight and decay) content quality; author quality; and in general, member engagement with content. Scores are used to rank members in widgets like Users - Top Quality Author Groups or to rank higher quality content higher in search results.
Social metrics and scores
The score social service calculates the value of all activities measured in a score. The overall score is an average of all its metrics, with the influence of weighting and decay. Scores are indicators of quality and affect placement in search results.
Metrics
Metrics are a component of scores. For example, a content quality score is partly derived from metrics such as bookmarks, comments, downloads, being featured, forum replies, likes, ratings, suggested answers, tags, user subscriptions, verified answers, and views. The content abuse score is partly derived from the aggregate abuse reporter metric. The metrics applied to each kind of score are listed on the site-level score configuration page.
Plugins
A number of metrics are enabled in the Manage Plugins page in the Control Panel as part of the Core functionality plugin. The metric plugins include:
- Average content quality
- Average group content quality
- Bookmarks
- Comments
- Downloads
- Featured
- Forum reply count
- Likes
- Ratings
- Suggested answer
- Tags
- User subscriptions
- Verified answers
- Views
Weights
Metric are configurable on sliders (like scales from lower to higher) that determine their relative importance, or weight, in scores. Weights let you customize the influence of metrics to your community's needs. For example in a gaming community, you might weight the download and like metrics more heavily (that is, higher on the "more" end of the slider) than you weight views.
Weight can only be set at the site level for the entire community; it's not configurable at the group or application level.
Decay
Decay is another component in scores. This tool is designed to counter content stagnation by reducing scores over time - older content can have lower scores than newer content.
If you enable decay, it uses a value called half life to determine when the score is reduced. So for example, a forum post that initially receives 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. You can set the decay rate for a score at the site 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).
At the site level, it's also possible to enable setting application-level decay overrides within groups.
Decay overrides
The point of decay override is to prevent content from being meaninglessly decayed. If decay override is enabled for a specific score (such as content quality) at the site level, it means that group owners can apply an override for the score (in this case, content quality) on a specific type of application - such as for all forums - within their group. For example using a content quality score override, the Gaming group owner(s) could make the content quality decay rate for forums more aggressive (such as using a half life of 15 days as opposed to the default value of 30) than for other applications within the group.
You can't enable overrides for some instances of an application but not for others within the same group. For example, within the Gaming group you can't make the Beginner forum content quality age more quickly than the Intermediate and Expert forums.
Community participation
An underlying premise of reputation is that community participation affects community quality - whether by surfacing high-quality authors (author quality score) and content (content quality score) in search, or maintaining the integrity of the community by reporting (abuse reporter score) and evaluating spam (abuse creator score).
Telligent Enterprise 4.0 has introduced new widgets that indicate list users and group on the basis of quality scores and allow community members to click through to profiles, mentions, and groups:
Development
For more information about developing with the score service, see Scoring.
- If you're using scoring as part of your custom functionality, you will be doing so in a plugin where you would be using the In-Process API (not REST).
- Scoring is not directly exposed in the REST APIs; instead, it is used indirectly (such as by sorting content by scores, returning groups where a member is a top author based upon scoring, etc.).
- If you want to create a score (and metrics) and expose your score(s) or expose content in a different way using your score(s), you can create your own APIs/REST endpoint, as we did for group author quality.
Related information