The Hibernate Forum has now been switched to a credit-based system. This hopefully encourages more people to help out others. It's very easy to use: Just click on the Rating link at the bottom of each answer someone gives to your question. If others do it for your answers you can continue opening new Topics.

Read the details here.

Oh, and many thanks to Sven Henckel who hacked the PHP code to make this possible :)

So basically the privilege to create new topics is now at the mercy of others finding your answers useful and taking the effort to say so by using the rating link!

As if the fear of not-always-so-pleasant replies from the Hibernate team wasn't enough of a deterrent :)

Well, it would be nice if the credit-based system would encourage you to help others but not leave you at the mercy of your replies being considered helpful by the original poster. Something like the Duke Dollars in Sun's Java forums.

Rishabh

We'll do some adjustments if adjustments are needed. The good thing, is that you can rate an Hibernate team answer as unhelpful if you think so :-P

This is a great idea, it will encourage (force) people like me to help other.

I have 2 small comments:

1- We should also force the post issuer to credit all the helpers before he can answer back (only in the current post). I know this can be tricky (or annoying), but i think the issuer should at least take the time to rank all or most posts because we are answering his question. And it just take miliseconds to post the appreciation vs many minutes to answer a question.

2- Maybe 10 posts is a bit short for newcomer. I know that I was greatly helped by this forum when I first try Hibernate 2 years ago. I probably post 20 letters just to start things up. And it took me 2 months to be able to answer the easiest question.

Etienne
Montreal

We thought that 10 "free" postings is a good value. Keep in mind that more initial credits encourage people to open up fake accounts using fake email addresses (we try to monitor these). There is always a balance between convenience and abuse. And, there are many many very simple questions that everyone with a little Java (not Hibernate) knowledge can answer to get some points. Seriously, if you don't know nothing at all, this is not the right place to spend your time. We'll rather tune the earnings ration (2 for 1 now) if needed.

About the "mercy of the Hibernate team": We stopped moderating the regular forum and our goal is to make it completely self-sustained with the credit system.

Etienne, about your (1): Let's see if this can become the norm without forcing people to rate. Technically it's not a big deal.

I have a proposal for negative credit.

The member have negative credits for next answers :

- read documentation - 1credit
- read faq - 2 credits
- it isn't possible, but patches are welcome - 3 credits

regards

There is no negative credit and if you would understand the system you'd understand that your "concern" is already taken care of by people rating helpful replies. A link to the FAQ or documentation can indeed be helpful, as you might have experienced yourself when others answered the hundreds of questions you yourself have and had. This is actually a good example of how the credit system will stop abuse.

Christian,
It was only a joke.

I agree to what Christian says. I would like to see everyone rating the replies to their questions on their own. Forcing people to do something is never the best solution. But of course, technically it should be quite easy to implement.

Best regards
Sven

I have to admit... I didn't like the idea at first, but in practice, I rather like it. Just hope I'm smart enough to find enough points for my own (often stupid) questions ;)

I can't find the rating link in the posts.
Is it because I'm a new user ?

You can only rate the replies to topics you created.
However, the current state (helpful, not helpful or not rated) of each rating is visible to every user.

I admit this has been a great idea, especially for people like me asking silly basic questions all the time and not getting any answers, as they were
a) either considered trivial by the members OR
b) answered elsewhere, where I could not get to even after the search and re-reading the documentation

Should no one respond then will I get more credits? Well thats a joke really :-).

What would be a great suggestion is to have a paid service where people pay a nominal amount and a experienced team responds to these questions, however trivial it may be. They all get paid for their time and most importantly, make good money out of it as well, which is equally important.

Paid service could be quaterly / annual and with many developers who use hibernate, the response team will have a sizable revenue. The revenue could go to the team OR for further development expenses.

This way it will help people like us also, who a couple of times despesperately needed answers, but nothing came by.

Rahul