For the most part? They’re just a bit of fun to encourage contributions and bit of friendly rivalry. They also help you identify users who are active and may be able to help.

It’s not just best answers that earn them however, other actions do as well. Completing any such action automatically awards a specified number of points - such as posting your question. Tim is the ultimate decision maker when it comes to what thing earns how many points. The Forum Moderators are the primary decision makers when assigning Best Answers, however Forum Volunteers such as myself also hold that power - we can assign answers instantly at our discretion.

As for what you get? Well, if you reach certain thresholds… Something good may happen…

Or in my case, roughly every six months, something good does happen. :D

Thank You. Its an interesting reply. While running something like points can encourage people it can also have a negative affect of making some contributions seem less worthy. Awarding points can down the seriousness of the answers submitted almost pulling us into some form of game where you play for points for your answer.

For my part I don't care about points or even the absence of them. If I see a question on here that I can contribute an answer to then I will. Quite often a discussion builds up and you get to see other people's point of view and expertise and sometimes learn something new. It's learning something new that is the reward. Not the points.

Peter (fossilised Carbon Catcher)

That’s actually the main focus here - being a ‘help each other’, mostly volunteer forum. Many wanting to pass on tips learned through their own experiences. 
Especially with new technologies, I’ve found that while some companies know about their own field, it often gets less knowledgeable when linked up in the real world - that’s where users experience comes into its own. 

It’s also worth noting that if someone is deliberately blowing up the forum purely for point farming and with no legitimate interest in actually contributing, we’ll treat them like any other spammer and deal with them as if they are one i.e. remove content and potentially ban them. We monitor this place constantly - pretty much ALL spam gets reported within 24 hours and expunged within 72 hours at most. And that also results in you losing points.

Spammers are not allowed to earn rewards - there’s manual checks to prevent that. And besides, the only users who are realistically eligible for points based rewards are the Forum Volunteers - and chances are we’d have already invited you to join us long before you got to the first tier.

We have rarely seen anyone making any serious attempt to blow up the leaderboard maliciously. Those that do don’t last long...

The points/leaderboard thing is also totally optional - you can completely ignore it if you’re not interested.

It took me a long time to find this. Search wasn’t really helpful, and sadly I can’t even remember where I eventually found it. It can languish in its obscurity as far as I’m concerned.

What about this recent poster, who may have created more than one profile for his strange stuff? He seems to have earned a lot of points in one day ...

That’s just a run-of-the-mill Script Kiddie. Basically a “hacker” who thinks they’re being clever just because they can download and run a certain Linux distro. Spoiler: Just about anyone could do that, but it doesn’t mean you should. Either way, their attempt to hack the forum failed anyway - the built-in protections instantly defeated them.

What they don’t realise is that I am also highly integrated into the moderation system of this forum. Hardly anything of that type gets past me and I actually reported it just minutes after it was posted. As an IT professional with cybersecurity experience, it takes but a moment for me to recognise exactly what they’re doing. Tim also makes use of that experience, but those details are kept under wraps.

That fool will be punished in the morning - I’ve already set fire to that thread in the moderation queue. It’ll be gone in the next 24 hours - along with all his points. Tim takes the view that all such users are to be treated as abusers, which results in an automatic ban. Just about anyone I flag for that kind of reason will find they rapidly lose their forum account and all their content… And yes, their points get wiped too.

Thanks for all your comments on this. For my part I’m with Peter E on this one and value the comments of the forums rather than the points.

Many fora give points and badges as a way of ‘encouraging’ members, there isn’t usually any reward apart from maybe gaining access to a ‘advanced contributor’ discussion area or extra post editing permission for your own posts, or the like.

I suspect that most who do run up the larger points totals ignore them anyway.
Any ‘advanced’ contributor quickly gets noticed without the need for at any such points or badges.

As far as I personally am concerned most are simply like the teacher handing out gold and silver stars to ‘bright’ pupils in the vauge hope that it will encourage others. And sometimes handing them to those others to try and directly encourage then to ‘try harder’ and get more meaningless stars.
I won’t go down the rabbit hole of  discussing all that here, there’s already plenty of (too much) discussion on the web both for and against such systems.

Hey @DavidWSR,

Our Community Members have given some really helpful and thoughtful advice here. It’s a really interesting point you raised, and clearly a great conversation starter! 

I just wanted to re-iterate that members can win points for providing a best answer, for posting a reply, for receiving a like or a vote, for giving a like or upvoting an idea and for creating a topic. 

Every answer or contribution on the Forum that aims to inform, assist or engage other members in a positive way is valued on the Forum! We’re all part of the discussion!