Idea: points breakdown and activity feed

[krozett]

The way I handled engagement points is pretty simple. Every user and organization (campus/lab/etc.) has a running point total. But that doesn't really convey a lot of information.

I think it would be better if we recorded who got points, when, and for what. Maybe we could display it on a user's profile in an activity feed.

There are several advantages:

• Users can verify that their points add up
• We get an activity feed that makes NeXt seem more alive (the engagement meter is pretty static)
• If we decide to change the points that actions are worth, we can do so retroactively
• If a user changes organizations, we could move their points with them if we want to
• Simpler to maintain in the code - for example, we don't need to hardcode "losing 3 points for deleting a project", we can just roll back the points we gave them for creating it
• We can easily add new engagement point types, like for profile stuff or badges... right now anything outside of ideas/projects is lumped into "other points" and so the information is effectively lost

Right now I'm just focusing on the way we store points internally. The sooner we do this the better, so we are collecting more information. Later we can decide how we want to display this information.