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Looking at the issue of Commitment Loss on Area 51 - I don't see any way for people who have committed early, to restore their commitment points, except by dropping and re-committing to the proposal. Which seems a bit gamey... Could we get a refresh button added, that would allow them to periodically re-commit? And maybe even send them email when their commitment contribution gets reduced?

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2 Answers 2

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I'm not opposed in principle, but I think in practice:

  1. a workaround already exists for the extremely passionate users (uncommit then recommit)
  2. only a small percentage of committers would use this
  3. the overall impact would probably be <1% for a proposal (since the adding the decay dropped proposals at most 10%, and I doubt more than 10% of committers would come back to renew).

So I'm going to mark it . If enough people disagree and upvote the then we'll reconsider.

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  • Out of curiosity, if I uncommit then recommit to my own proposal - nothing funky happens, right? It doesn't make community the proposal owner or anything? :)
    – John C
    Commented Mar 22, 2011 at 22:02
  • @John no, nothing happens -- you can own a proposal that you're not committed to :)
    – David Fullerton
    Commented Mar 22, 2011 at 22:09
  • How do I upvote on the feature request tag (or on any individual tags for that matter)? Or did you just mean upvote the OP's question?
    – bguiz
    Commented Apr 29, 2011 at 0:13
  • @David how many is enough people?
    – jachguate
    Commented Nov 14, 2012 at 7:32
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Either make it so they can refresh, or make it so their points won't increase if they uncommit then recommit.

The reason commitments are aged is so that slowly stumbling proposals aren't launched. I'm not sure that just because people come and refresh their commitment, the proposal has any more likely of a chance of surviving than if we didn't allow them to refresh. Does activity on area51 correlate to site success?

Alternately, the commitment aging may not be performing the job it's meant to do. It could be that we need to reverse it, and say the longer a proposal has been in the commitment stage, the more commitments are needed, thus resolving both the zombie proposal problem and the gaming aspect of refreshing one's commitment, but in a straightforward and understandable manner.

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    Activity on Area 51 in general may not correlate to site success - having a group of experts who are devoted to the proposal and keep revisiting it because they want to back it, though, tends to help a lot.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Mar 21, 2011 at 17:21
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    From one comment: "Our data shows that the older the commitment, the less likely the person is to actually show up". But if they push a Refresh button in month X, then they have shown up. If a person's commitment is in doubt, based on its age, then when they show up and re-commit, I'd say they have removed that doubt, and their commitment is valid...
    – John C
    Commented Mar 21, 2011 at 17:22
  • what do you mean, "make it so their points won't increase"? I had assumed (possibly wrongly :) that if someone who committed on day one - six month later, if they uncommitted, their entire contribution would be removed from the committed percentage. And if they subsequently re-committed, the committed percentage would increase by the same amount as it did on day one. So all it would do is offset the decrease over time they experienced.
    – John C
    Commented Mar 21, 2011 at 21:55
  • @John what I mean is that to be self consistent we need to either make it so the work around of uncomitting and recomitting doesn't change anything, or we should acknowledge that the workaround is ok, and therefore make it official by providing a refresh button. Right now it's a little bit of limbo. People can do the trick effectively, but it's not sanctioned. If it's good for the system, we should make it official and easy to do. If it's not good for the system, then we should make it so the trick doesn't work.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented Mar 21, 2011 at 23:41
  • ah, that makes sense now. Obviously I'm on the side of making it official - I certainly can't see how it would be bad for system.
    – John C
    Commented Mar 22, 2011 at 0:37

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