Hello. Anybody here?

I'm here. I haven't had my coffee yet this morning so I'm a bit delayed :)

@amccormack Good to see someone here :)

I wanted to discuss some stuff with everybody, probably will have to write a meta post now. I thought 3-4 people showed up last time

I think there was only a few people signed up. Last I checked.

@amccormack Anyways, coming to the issue. Do you know about the announcer, booster and publicist badges ? Or what they are for?

This is a kind of survey question.

Dont look them up :)

I'm on my mobile so I can't look them up. But from what I remember they are for rewarding link sharing.

@amccormack Ah, I just wanted to know if people have heard of them before or not.

It is supposed to encourage tweeting or blogging about questions. But you only get credit if people actually click the link.

I was thinking of planning a long 10 day event on the site to celebrate 100 days of RE.SE

Sounds interesting, what do you have in mind?

We basically have issues with low questions, low number of edits/improvements and sharing (just one announcer badge)

So, the event would be something that tries to increase engagement in all these areas.

I was thinking of a "100 Days of RE Contest"

I like the goal, how do we implement?

Starting day 90 till day 100, the contest will be on. We will have an alternate scoring arrangement than the reputation.

Can we do that?

Or can SE even do that?

@amccormack The alternate scoring ? Sort of. It will take work on the part of Moderators and possibly some help from the active users would be great.

Basically, it will be through daily manual updation and once in a while (every 3-4 days) we could ask somebody from SE to run queries on the DB.

Its possible, its been done before.

Ah, it sounds like a good idea.

What if we held a ctf challenge to drive questions? Maybe different re ctf challenges? Binary disassembly, fuzzing, network protocol analysis et?

@amccormack How would we do that?

I see a few possibilities.

@amccormack Wouldnt that take a lot of work in designing the challenges itself?

We could temporarily allow each challenge to be posted as a question, and the answer would go to the best writeup

It would, they take some time, but it isn't too hard.

How many days until the 90th day?

We are on day 59

@amccormack I like the idea, but how would it increase questions ?

Ah, alright, so we have about a month if we wanted to take that route.

I can see maybe increased activity on that specific challenge question. But beyond that ?

Well if we didn't post the challenge as a question, then we people may need to ask about techniques that they don't know.

@amccormack I think we should do this but slightly differently. Maybe something on the lines of a "RE challenge of the month" ?

So if there is a fuzzing challenge, that may drive fuzzing questions. It may be only a temporary bump to begin with, but it could drive traffic long term as more people may be introduced

That is a good idea as well. Keep people interested.

We could hold a regular challenge, every month or every alternate month.

Depending on interest.

We already came up with one excellent idea :)

Right. If a prize is awarded to the winner, it might drive more interest. Even if it was something relatively cheap, like a RE. SE coffee mug

@amccormack That shouldn't be a problem. Although it will probably be SE merchandise not RE.SE, because we are relatively new.

Getting funding for the challenge prize would be the hard part, but maybe commercial sponsors can be found.

@amccormack For the prizes ? SE does the funding, if we can successfully hold the challenge.

Ah, wasn't aware of that. Very cool.

That still leaves how to promote the 100 days event

For the 100 day event though, I was thinking of something different than the challenge. Something more based on the site features and to encourage overall activity on the site. The reason being that for the site eventually moving to graduation, we will need activity on all fronts. Reviewing, editing, asking, answering, closing reopening, etc.

This is a rough outline of what I was thinking. Sec.SE had a similar contest before. It would include four different categories of actions :

Asking questions : The score of the questions would directly translate to the score during the contest period. That is, a score of +5 on the question, would mean a +5 score in the contest table.

Answering questions : The score of the answers would translate to 0.5 time the score in the contest, as we need to encourage more questions than answers at this point. So, a +4 score on an answer would mean a +2 score in the contest table.

This is something entirely based on encouraging site usage.

I like it.

The weight to asking is more because well, we need more questions for now

The threshold for eligibility in the contest would be a minimum of 3 actions distributed across a minimum of 3 categories, that is, atleast one question + one edit + one answer.

What about encouraging activity from the people who don't really care about rep? And even encouraging sign ups. Can we do anything for that?

@amccormack The sharing badges are partly for that.

They require visits from unique IP addresses.

Which could translate to new users.

Good point, that would address that

So at the end of the contest, users get their rep bonus?

@amccormack Reputation continues normally.

The scoring for the contest is done outside the system manually or through queries.

So is it just tracked separately, you don't actually get increased rep?

This does not impact any of the in site features in any way.

@amccormack If you get an upvote on a Q during the contest, you get normal rep increase.

Consider it as an additional layer working on top of the system, without affecting the system in any way. The layer gets removed at the end of it, leaving the system untouched.

I can see how this would work for some users, but how many people do you think would be interested in just winning? Should we offer incentives?

@amccormack Oh yes. Prizes should be there.

Ah, that would be cool. Se merch or do you have other prizes in mind

I think we would have prizes for overall winners. I did think of category winners, but that wont work out.

@amccormack For now SE merchandise. Later we could give out software licenses or just about anything that fits within whatever budget SE gives us.

But all of that is, assuming we get this 100 day event and the Challenge event up and running and successful :)

I like it. Do you want to write it up on meta? I can write up the challenge outline

@amccormack I will write it up tomorrow. Dont have time at the moment.

You go ahead and write up the Challenge post.

Sounds good.

Anything else you want to discuss while we're here

@amccormack Not really. That was the main thing. Do you have anything in mind?

Nope . I'm all set. Good meeting.

@amccormack Very productive meeting. See you next time :)

Yup, see you later.

Anyone here?