Do dinosaur developers ever loose points on SharePoint.StackOverflow?

Question

I did an analysis of the SharePoint.StackOverflow rankings.

With any other topic a leaderboard like this would make sense;

But what does this ranking mean in the SharePoint world? Where SP2010 is almost dinosaur technology..

And if new users (lets call them Office365 experts) get into SharePoint.StackOverflow they might earn about 3000 points a year.

That means they have to be active for over 5 years to bypass Wictor in the ranking...

This ranking is wrong, how can we fix it??

Page 2 has a couple of users who have not logged in for 3 years....

Update #1

GreaseMonkey Script I used, or run from console/bookmarklet

function dyc(d, html) {
    var el = document.createElement('p');
    if (html) return ~~((new Date() - new Date((el.innerHTML = html, el).querySelector(d + ' .relativetime').title)) / 864e5);
    return d < 60 ? 'yellowgreen' : d < 180 ? 'lightcoral' : d < 365 ? 'firebrick' : 'black';
}
[].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('.user-info'), function (user) {
    $.get(user.querySelector('a').href, function (profile) {
        $.get(user.querySelector('a').href + '?tab=answers&sort=newest', function (answers) {
            var login = dyc('.icon-time +', profile),
                answer = dyc('#user-tab-answers', answers);
            user.querySelector('.user-tags').innerHTML = '<b style=background:' + dyc(login) + '>Login ' + login + '  Answer ' + answer + '</b>';
            user.style.cssText = 'color:#fff;width:21em;margin:1px;background:' + dyc(answer);
        });
    });
});

Answer 1

This is a partly a factor of how Stack Exchange works. If you have a large body of quality work it will continue to earn points for a long time after it is posted. Wictor will continue to gain points on this site even if he never logs in again, because users will continue to find his posts useful.

But there's also another factor at work here...

You are not playing on a level field with those users from years past.

Take a look at the highest-voted questions on the site. By year, and discounting the Community Wiki questions, they break down as follows:

'09 - 1
'10 - 4
'11 - 17
'12 - 10
'13 - 3
'14 - 1
'15 - 0

In the past three years - nealy half of this community's lifetime - only four questions have managed to crack the top fifty in terms of votes, and the last time a top-50 question was asked was May 10, 2014 - a year and a half ago.

Now, using this particular metric as a proxy for site health is admittedly not perfect. You can interpret it however you want. But my impression is that quality questions, quality answers, and the people to vote for them are much, much harder to come by than they were in the good old days of 2011 and 2012. So try as you might you are never going to catch Wictor.

Answer 2

I’m currently stationed as a subcontractor in a larger county within health care. They have almost all the version of SharePoint (2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013) still in use. The older ones are often old records where only a few users have access. Still these older instances needs to be there as an archive for several reasons:

• Health care systems have restrictions on how long records are to be kept regulated by law. 10 years or more isn’t unusual.
• Records are kept for making research possible for whatever reason. As a strategy they have decided to keep everything even remotely valuable.
• There is a substantial cost involved to move everything to a single repository that works for every system. Especially if there are customized solutions with integration to other non-SharePoint systems. Still there have been several studies on the case trying to migrate from the older versions, but to this date none have succeeded.

Beginning with SharePoint only 3½ years ago, SharePoint.SE is an incredible valuable source of information, and often gives quicker answers on specific questions. SP.SE is my first search attempt of every question I have using the search string site:sharepoint.stackexchange.com in my favorite search engine.

Dinosaur Developers are the real heroes of this community, since they possess a knowledge hard to come by elsewhere. And since they know so much about SharePoint and its evolution, they are very busy and don’t always have the time to attend here. I notice that myself when I got a lot to do that several questions of which I know the answer, I simply don’t have the time to answer.

Answer 3

I believe there is nothing to fix here :)

First of all it doesn't matter if SharePoint 2010 or 2007 is "dinosaur" technology - people are still looking for help on these topics. Secondly, why would you say it doesn't matter if someone contributed to this site 5 years ago? It's still a contribution nevertheless. And based on the score - a very helpful contribution.

Last, but most important - it's not about the rankings or fame, but about the help we can provide and get. I wouldn't mind to be at the bottom of the user list knowing that I helped someone :) I would give you my reputation points if that would help you feel better.

P.S. - should be moved to philosophy board, imo.

tl;dr; - dinosaur developers should never loose points.

Answer 4

I don't necessarily mind the way that points are generated or who has them, but I do think this raises a legitimate issue:

Since it is 'harder' for posts to get as many votes now as they were a few years ago, how can we do a better job of promoting the most up-to-date practices for different questions that are out there?

When someone asks something like "how do I retrieve data with the same content type across many sub sites?" years ago (think 2007 era) we would have gone into how to setup a content query web part then modify the xslt or how to make a user control that runs server side code that fetches everything for you -- today though, while those techniques are viable, there are a number of easier ways that provide much better support across different environments (mostly the search service, but also various other CSOM techniques)

I don't necessarily think that version tagging takes care of this all on its own either: if you have a question like Simple way to color code a column in a document library? it doesn't really matter if it gets tagged with some annual version, people are still going to ask the same kind of question in 2020 and get this answer

If the answer to How do I know if the page is in Edit Mode from JavaScript? changes, how can we surface that answer to the person searching for it? It's rare for even incredibly accurate, detailed, and helpful answers to yield more than 3-5 votes most months.

Is a new comment on the answer appropriate? It may never see the light of day if there are many others. Should we make edits to other authors posts? I would think no, but maybe folks have different opinions (should this be a new question on meta?)

Answer 5

Reputation is earned for users that contribute to the site. Helpful answers will get high upvotes based on their answer or question. I'll upvote (and others will) a question if: it is well worded, hasn't been asked before, and/or if the level of expertise exceeds that of more trivial questions. I'll upvote (and others will) answers if the effort that is put into the answer exceeds trivial answers with pictures and lengthy explanations, if the answer is unique to the other answers, or is specific to his/her experience. My point is, many experts get the most reputation based on their extensive knowledge on the topic and gives a great answer that most users wouldn't think of.

As soon as new technologies come out and more users join SharePoint.StackExchange, I think some of the good questions will be asked by some and answered by others. I won't speak for everyone, but I think some people get enough reputation to be content, mostly for me it was around 2k, and everything else is just lagniappe. Most of the neutral and opinionated questions that are good to know and gathered most reputation have already been asked such as:

Are SharePoint certifications worthwhile?

List of SharePoint development tools

Support for URL rewriting?

I do appreciate your question, and I think what you may be looking for is an additional ranking system based on tags, which could be very possible.