Glinkster Score FAQ

Ok, ok - you might be asking yourself 'What's this Glinkster Score in my profile, and why should I care?' Glinkster wants to encourage not just activity on the site, but also quality activity. We feel we should reward those that post good links, make good comments and share cool bookmarks. Glinkster is basically a large voting system, but we don't feel every vote should be treated equal. Glinkster rewards users by placing more weight on their votes the higher their score is. Think of it as a 'Quality Score'.

How is it Calculated?

Well here's where it gets a little tricky. If we told you exactly how we calculated the Glink score, the front of our page would be swarmed with spam. Let's go over some of the basics:

We want to encourage both quantity of usage as well as quality of usage. Moreover, we want reward those who joined Glinkster earlier, yet not make it impossible for someone who joins later to catch up to the big boys. So here's where it gets interesting.

Your Glink Score increases every time you:

  • 'Glink' a link
  • Add a new link to the site
  • Add a link to your bookmarks
  • Comment on someone's link

Your Glink Score also goes up when:

  • Someone comments on your link
  • Someone 'Glinks' a link you posted
  • Someone bookmarks a link you posted

Now these are not all weighted evenly. Why not? Read on:

For example, let's say you read a great review of the Nintendo Wii on your favorite blog. You think others will like this, so you submit the link to Glinkster. You'll get a boost in score from just submitting this link. Now others see the new link, and if they like it, they 'Glink' the link. You get a boost in score for each vote your story gets. Now, a great debate breaks out in the comments on your link. You get a boost in score for every comment another user makes on your story. These users also get boosts in score for making comments on links.

So what's to stop someone from just submitting a bunch of crap links and bloating their score? Every action (submitting a link, Glinking, commenting etc) has a different weight. So while you do get a boost from submitting a link, it might not be as much of a boost as you get from, say, people commenting on your link. We're trying to both encourage quality and quantity with this methodology.

I just submitted two Links, but got a different score boost for each one. Huh?

So we had to go a bit deeper than what we described above. Not only does each action boost your score, but we also take into account the quality of the action.

What the heck did you just say?

Ok, when you submit a link, we also put weight on the quality of the link. We you submit a link, Glinkster automatically analyzes that link and takes into account such things as:
  • Relevancy
  • Popularity of subject matter
  • Tags
  • History of the subject on Glinkster
  • Credibility of the source
  • Quality of other Glinkster users who have participated in this topic
  • And a few other odds and ends.
This quality mechanism goes for 'Glinking', commenting and other activity as well.
So don't be surprised if you get different increases in your Glink Score each time you make a comment or someone comments on your link. Don't be surprised when you get different increases in your Glink Score when you 'Glink' a link or when someone 'Glinks' your link. Each action is assigned a different weight depending on many factors. This is to discourage spammers from easily reverse engineering the algorithm and gaming the front page with garbage links.
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