[Jamika]

I don't think that rewarding members who contribute quality content will create a divide between members; on the contrary. I don't want to seem pretentious, but I've created many threads to help forum members, including one that guides beginners, and I always make myself available when they have questions. Additionally, this could also motivate beginners to improve and, in turn, help others. I started on HF nearly 6 years ago without knowing anything about security or hacking, and thanks to members who helped me, I am now able to help others ✌️

Furthermore, having a distinguishing feature for those who produce quality content will make it easier for beginners to identify the people they can approach and rely on if they have questions, which will facilitate exchanges

You r one of most helpful staff, and general hf members, who helps new ones indeed

Proplem is that some act as they cant post high quality posts! As they are born to post shit

[Carl Elias]

I liked the idea Bastille suggested about including integration for Github, HTB, TryHackMe, etc. It isn't really increasing site quality directly, but indirectly it may provide some sort of "validation" of the users contributions/skills.


One thought I had was to bring back the upgraded user forum, but allow all members to view the forum. Its been so long, but I feel like previously that forum was private to only upgraded members, which was a small part of its removal since it did not add any public content - may be wrong, but that's what I think I remember happening. It may not help encourage quality post, but might bring in more quality threads possibly.

---

Another thought I had is probably a good amount of work, but may be a GREAT option. I was thinking of the possibility of HF implementing post ratings based off AI (for fun I asked ChatGPT to rate this post, see its response Here) and utilizing those post ratings to reward members.

For example if your profiles average post ratings is 95% or higher, you get +/-1 Popularity abilities until you drop below 95%. Another option could be that the amount of bytes you earn per post/thread is proportionate to the post rating.

This AI option would also possibly allow HF to recommend to users ideas on how to make their post better

[illuminati▲]

Aside from bytes and awards :

- A hall of fame
- A special title
- Membership in an exclusive group (e.g., "c0ntribut0r")
- A glowing aura or animation around their profile picture, with different colors corresponding to the forums they are most active/helpful in
- A glowing or animated username, compatible with group colors and based on the above activity
- A glowing banner
- A glowing bio box
- A special theme on their profile
- Granting additional privileges, such as:
> Increasing the popularity power (up to 4 / 5 / 6 ...)
> Increasing the daily popularity limit
> Increasing the bytes earning bonus
> Larger signature space / increasing the signature size limit

It could also be beneficial to implement features such as integrating TryHackMe and Hack The Box profiles on HF for people active in the hacking sectio, like this:

<img src="https://tryhackme-badges.s3.amazonaws.com/Yseurk.png" alt="TryHackMe">

Or similarly, integrating GitHub profiles so active members can share their contributions, for members active in the Coding section

Integrating GitHub & THM & HTB could be an interesting thing..

The profile customization is something I think a few members would be interested in.

I definitely think a Hall of Fame is a good idea that could probably be implemented easily, it could be spread up into different categories;
Proven Hackers, Fallen comrades (members that have passed away), long time members, former staff members/mentors, etc.

Popularity is kinda pointless as it doesn't mean shit.

If we increased the bytes, we should also find some new things that bytes could be used for.

I'm sure someone had this idea in the past. I'll write it down anyway:

HF needs its own ERC20 token which is also traded on the market and listed on CMC. The token should then replace the bytes and this way you can incentivize HQ content. This will also attract many new users. The idea is brilliant, but it comes with many challenges and problems, such as:

- Price manipulation
- ChatGPT content
- More bots
- Post hunting
- Alt accounts

Yeah, there are too many different variables that would make this more of a headache than helpful I think.

A few additional ideas came to mind during the night. I believe that to improve the quality on HF, we need to focus on two vectors :

Experienced Members: We should motivate our seasoned members to produce high-quality content. As discussed earlier, offering more privileges, awards, and unique features—such as glowing usernames, custom profile pictures, new themes, and so on—can act as rewards.

New Members: It's crucial to engage new members with potential right from the moment they register on HF.

Regarding the second point, here are some ideas:

- We have hat awards ready, but you mentioned uncertainty about how they could be implemented on HF: https://hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=6220705

What if we allowed both old and new members to choose a hat that defines their profile? This could facilitate easier connections between members who share similar goals and skills. For example:

• - White Hat: Cybersecurity
  
• - Black Hat: Hacking
  
• - Grey Hat: A mix of White and Black
  
• - Green Hat: Money / e-whoring / Business
  
• - Red Hat: Gaming / Social
  
• - Blue Hat: Coding
  

I think for some of the members that are more on the sketchy side of law this would be like planting a target on their back.
Like I get it, they do what they do and that's their choice, but it feels like a way to help assist feds more than it would do good.
May we could utilize the awards and hand them out to members more frequently if they prove themselves, and whatnot.

• Increase popularity points based on the popularity given
  
• Different colored apples for a new milestone reached (Add-ons with other apples or swapped after each milestone is reached)
  • 1k - Green
    
  • 2.5k - Bronze
    
  • 5k - Silver
    
  • 10k - Gold
    
• Increase Bytes earned per post/thread based on average PPD
  
• Release a few awards that are required to be maintained. For example, the Everyday Ninja award is a one-time requirement of 100 posts and that's it. What if we had awards that must be sustained by making X posts in specific categories each month?
  
• We could also make QL half-off on random occasions... similar to bonus days for Bytes
  

These suggestions may help maintain activity. As far as quality... I'm not too sure. I think quality will grow over time as rules will be broken more often if it activity increases; staff will enforce policy and hopefully fix the issue by default.

I think some awards that drive more activity could potentially be helpful.
Like, the golden bar award, could have a bronze, silver, etc.

[Oak]

My suggestions:
Delete popularity, go back to reputation with custom messages.
Delete most awards, limit the amount of purchasable awards.
De-monetize much of the site.
Promote social (lounge, gaming, etc) as it's always been popular and that isn't a bad thing.
Quit deleting threads and posts. It's demoralizing when you put work into posting and engaging and it gets culled. That said I understand there may need to be balance here for the sake of server capacity.
Re-instate official groups that are worth pursuing (similar to prior groups like HJT Team / MRT, Reviewers, Writers, etc. Mentors is a good start imo).
Quit deading and banning people that get on your nerves. Put up with some bullshit from people that contribute to the site. Or just ignore drama sometimes, don't necessarily get involved when a lot of it will blow over.
Separate out Crew userbars and make them smaller, emphasize userbars and groups again. Reduce confusion and fluff.
Get rid of the +10 / -10 BS and buyables like that from private groups. Revert that back to official mods and admins only.

Imo, much of the HQ from back in the day was a top layer of people that contributed most heavily to the site. People were notable and respected in the community, they were differentiated from others. Awards meant something, rep meant something, you could tell someone was someone by their profile. These people drove further HQ as people wanted to build their own reputation on the site and become known themselves. Nowadays it's a mass bland mess of meaninglessness. There's nothing to work for, there's no reason to be HQ, and there's no 'reward' in becoming someone on the site. Everyone is able to drench themselves in glamour and it's impossible to tell who's who or verify that someone's actually 'HQ' or just spent a bunch of money on the site.

[Jamika]

My suggestions:
Delete popularity, go back to reputation with custom messages.
Delete most awards, limit the amount of purchasable awards.
De-monetize much of the site.
Promote social (lounge, gaming, etc) as it's always been popular and that isn't a bad thing.
Quit deleting threads and posts. It's demoralizing when you put work into posting and engaging and it gets culled. That said I understand there may need to be balance here for the sake of server capacity.
Re-instate official groups that are worth pursuing (similar to prior groups like HJT Team / MRT, Reviewers, Writers, etc. Mentors is a good start imo).
Quit deading and banning people that get on your nerves. Put up with some bullshit from people that contribute to the site. Or just ignore drama sometimes, don't necessarily get involved when a lot of it will blow over.
Separate out Crew userbars and make them smaller, emphasize userbars and groups again. Reduce confusion and fluff.
Get rid of the +10 / -10 BS and buyables like that from private groups. Revert that back to official mods and admins only.

Imo, much of the HQ from back in the day was a top layer of people that contributed most heavily to the site. People were notable and respected in the community, they were differentiated from others. Awards meant something, rep meant something, you could tell someone was someone by their profile. These people drove further HQ as people wanted to build their own reputation on the site and become known themselves. Nowadays it's a mass bland mess of meaninglessness. There's nothing to work for, there's no reason to be HQ, and there's no 'reward' in becoming someone on the site. Everyone is able to drench themselves in glamour and it's impossible to tell who's who or verify that someone's actually 'HQ' or just spent a bunch of money on the site.

Sure omni good reply but wanna say
1- reward and its selling is a must as source of income for him, otherwise we have all to pay him, its a way to make a win win situation

2- old members already posted and carried the forum, so do new ones, despite that new ones find it hard to get rewards old members already had, i am here for almost a year and i posted more than half od members, u can believe some posted 10 posts from 10 years and came back now to find themselves with skull award which i will get when i die probably

3- value and trust cant be controlled or judged by rep, many scammed with high rep, and with thousands of cash, so not ql or rep or anything is a measure, u can read others review and see, or use middle man

4-old posts deleted to make forum light and when move to a new server, and as it will not affect ur bytes or reward then why its important?

[Carl Elias]

There is a generational age gap from old members to new members. Letting a bunch of old heads debate over "popularity this", "I miss the old X", "Remember when we had uber/leet forums?", "Merge this and this to make it look more active" and "awards were earned in my day blah blah" is just old men yelling at clouds speaking primarily from emotion and nostalgia. Nothing more.

I do feel like the account age gap is noticeable and you are not wrong about the debating. I will say that the award system in my eyes has lost my interest. The one example that I can think of is back when we had the clover award that was randomly awarded to posts that had over XX characters. That was one period of time that I felt more inclined to create posts. This is what lead me to making my own user script to count characters in my posts to increase the chances of getting one by making sure all my posts met that character limit. Of course we do have the Hackuman awards today, but those go away overtime and if you do not really play the game, there is not really a point of the award.

Another period of time that inclined me to post more was when we had the "Prestige" rating system. It was a mystery and there were a number of people spending time tracking their HF interactions to try to reverse engineer the formula used to create that rating, two of which being Steve and Xerotic. Of course they got much further than I did, but it was a fun trying to crack the rating.


This is why I suggested bringing back something that encourages posting. My idea of using some AI or post-quality rating to weigh posts and give rewards based off that weight may be beneficial and is similar to the clover award and prestige ratings except this method puts quality ratings directly to post and not just the account as a whole. Doing so would hopefully create both quantity and quality posts. With the amount of content generated on HF, I feel like it would totally be possible to create a dataset of "quality posts" to be referenced when creating the rating of newer posts.

[Cap]

Aside from bytes and awards :

- A hall of fame
- A special title
- Membership in an exclusive group (e.g., "c0ntribut0r")
- A glowing aura or animation around their profile picture, with different colors corresponding to the forums they are most active/helpful in
- A glowing or animated username, compatible with group colors and based on the above activity
- A glowing banner
- A glowing bio box
- A special theme on their profile
- Granting additional privileges, such as:
> Increasing the popularity power (up to 4 / 5 / 6 ...)
> Increasing the daily popularity limit
> Increasing the bytes earning bonus
> Larger signature space / increasing the signature size limit

It could also be beneficial to implement features such as integrating TryHackMe and Hack The Box profiles on HF for people active in the hacking sectio, like this:

<img src="https://tryhackme-badges.s3.amazonaws.com/Yseurk.png" alt="TryHackMe">

Or similarly, integrating GitHub profiles so active members can share their contributions, for members active in the Coding section.


I can see this especially with new members looking for automated tools / script, they don't want to spend time understanding they just want a "magic tool / command line" to hack everything. Even when they open a thread asking for help they provide 0 details, when you ask them : What did you try already to fix the issue ? They reply : "I tried everything"


I agree with the best response as a metric, this could definitely help

Stemming off of these ideas, here are my thoughts:
What if we did something along the lines of a tiered system with certain milestones or XP. At each milestone, you receive a special perk or reward essentially for the continuous dedication. Or we could do it based off of XP, where each action grants you a certain amount of XP. After XP is met, you essentially rank up and receive a perk. Here is how it could possibly look:

Tier 1:
- 5 tutorials/guides approved by Staff
- 2 site contests
- Upgraded 3 members
- Received 1 best response (by staff)
Reward:
- Award (maybe a tiered award that changes based on what tier you're on?)
- 10% increase in bytes per post

Tier 2:
- 10 tutorials/guides approved by Staff
- 5 site contests
- Upgraded 5 members
- Received 3 best responses (by staff)
- Completed 5 award goals
Reward:
- Award (next version of it)
- 20% increase in bytes per post
- +2 in popularity power
- Lower bytes bump fee

Tier 3:
- 15 tutorials/guides approved by Staff
- 7 site contests
- Upgraded 10 members
- Received 5 best responses (by staff)
Reward:
- Award (final version of it)
- 30% increase in bytes per post
- +4 in popularity power
- Glowing username
- Added to special group/hall of fame

Of course nothing is set in stone and these are just simple ideas that popped in my head. I know it would be a lot of work to implement something like this, but I feel it may drive quality activity.

[Jamika]

You're asking the wrong people.
The only people this post is going to reach are people that love HF, understand HF and want more than anything for it to grow into the healthy being it once was hanging onto nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia.

DMAIC plans to new members can be issued in the welcome PM. If you want to know why they showed up, what they want to see, and what would make them continuously checking; Simply ask them. What's a 5 minute survey for 100 bytes to unlock some links in the hacking tutorials section?
Qualitative research has never been cheaper.

As you get answers, refine your DMAIC survey into targeted data analysis.
From there, you can impose your demand system, imply metric quotas to highly valued content areas and imposing of a new kind of rewards system similar to bytes (perhaps call it HF IQ?) in which these points cannot be traded to other members, but are redeemable for perhaps old awards that are no longer available, or a select conversion into bytes. The higher demand topic, the higher IQ points earned. These trending topics can be pulled from anywhere.
The data is there, and the data doesn't lie. There is a generational age gap from old members to new members. Letting a bunch of old heads debate over "popularity this", "I miss the old X", "Remember when we had uber/leet forums?", "Merge this and this to make it look more active" and "awards were earned in my day blah blah" is just old men yelling at clouds speaking primarily from emotion and nostalgia. Nothing more.


It's true your market segment for traffic has dwindled, and the PR opportunities for HF isn't as buzzing in favor of "edgier" forums, but the curious minds are still out there. It's upto you to inspire your members to create content that draws them in.

This is just my two cents, as someone who has contributed extensively in my past lives because I simply enjoyed it, garnishing thousands of replies from my tutorials and hand-written threads, this would have inspired me to contribute even more.


edit:
Also, GPT integration and modernization with MyBB is time. From what I've seen, the implementation of posting as a person doesn't garnish good reception, but a little hack-buddy help-bot could never hurt and provide intrinsic value to the site through an API for minimal to no fee.

I like the idea of points that only got by your effort, no buy no trade no transfer no flip

If u wanna sell it to bytes do, or exchange for rewards

Very smart!

[neiqhtworks.]

Group Battles.

Bi-Weekly tournament between all groups that enter. Charge either a byte fee or a Bitcoin fee per player required ie: $20/p League=$100 entry, Risk=$20 entry. Winner keeps a percent, house keeps a percent. Add these games to the sports betting to encourage participation outside of players.

Give the winning teams "Group Battle Points" to spend on awards and other goodies like sticky credits, the amount of points people get is based on the size of the group and placement in the tournament.

Entry requirements: group must have an overall warning level below 10% (this might be an issue if we bring mentors back), group must have at least 100 posts in the last 30 days outside the SF.


I am willing to host the first one to gauge response before creating a whole new plugin.

Edit: seems like there is a little confusion on what the battles would be.. a good example would be maybe one battle would be a custom Minecraft plugin that separates players into their team and the first team to beat the ender dragon wins. Pvp enabled, your team can have unlimited players but remember every player costs $20.

Another weekend it could be a simple ARAM tournament, blackjack, CSGO, TFT, Yahtzee, etc etc.

[Jamika]

Group Battles.

Bi-Weekly tournament between all groups that enter. Charge either a byte fee or a Bitcoin fee per player required ie: $20/p League=$100 entry, Risk=$20 entry. Winner keeps a percent, house keeps a percent. Add these games to the sports betting to encourage participation outside of players.

Give the winning teams "Group Battle Points" to spend on awards and other goodies like sticky credits, the amount of points people get is based on the size of the group and placement in the tournament.

Entry requirements: group must have an overall warning level below 10% (this might be an issue if we bring mentors back), group must have at least 100 posts in the last 30 days outside the SF.


I am willing to host the first one to gauge response before creating a whole new plugin.

Nice idea, can make it with bytes entry per group, and winners who post hq posts and threads, be active more, and so on

Idk, but ur idea is good

[neiqhtworks.]

Nice idea, can make it with bytes entry per group, and winners who post hq posts and threads, be active more, and so on

Idk, but ur idea is good

Bytes logically make the most sense but I'm not sure if it's the biggest incentive the way things are right now, I think if you gave group owners a way to potentially profit off their group it would revive them. However hosting money tournaments probably involves a lot of legal stuff. I also think it's the most lucrative to Omni if it was somehow involving real tender as he could collect from both the gambling side and the prize percentage side.

[Tyr]

Only Secret Society members post HQ content.

[illuminati▲]

Only Secret Society members post HQ content.

Umm. Did you read the thread?

We recommend you take the time to read the HF Help Documents section. The answer to your questions should be contained in there.

[Tyr]

Umm. Did you read the thread?

We recommend you take the time to read the HF Help Documents section. The answer to your questions should be contained in there.

Have you actually read the amount of contributions that would be deemed HQ over the years to this forum of which I have made in an effort to help people? It becomes a tad exhausting.

[illuminati▲]

Have you actually read the amount of contributions that would be deemed HQ over the years to this forum of which I have made in an effort to help people? It becomes a tad exhausting.

Life is exhausting but we still do it no?