FAQ thread: let's answer questions together!

[s_ben]

These are generally good answers, solid writing. A couple points that may make wording more accurate:

@Bex

No, you cannot manually edit anyone’s Cred score, including your own. If you feel a person or group is earning Cred that is not equivalent to their contributions to a project, you can change the weights, which determine what how much Cred each type of contribution earns. A community will determine their own rules for when to change their community’s weights.

Pretty sure this is correct, though remember at one point in time we had a ‘manual mode’ plugin that did allow you do arbitrarily change a node’s score. Presumably refactored out by now.

@Bex

<When and how is new Cred minted?>

If a contribution is valuable, there are mechanisms for the community to signal their appreciation of it with likes or emojis (depending on the platform) which “mints” (aka creates) new Cred for that contribution node. This Cred minting is like new water falling into the contribution’s pond in the form of rain. That new water flows through the creeks to the other ponds downstream of it.

This is a good answer, but just to nitpick, “signal their appreciation of it with likes or emojis (depending on the platform)” isn’t exactly accurate, at least not all the time. Right now, we only mint Cred on likes for the Discoruse plugin, and emojis for the Discord plugin. However, for the GitHub plugin, we mint on merged PRs and reviews on merged PRs. And, a community can (and very well might in the future) change the weights such that Cred is minted on raw activity; indeed, the way we “hacked” minting only on like in the Discourse plugin is by setting the other weights to 0. Generally speaking, I would say the the community signals their appreciation by engaging with the contribution, such as with likes and emojis (which are a specific type of engagement that implies some kind of review/value judgement, as opposed to raw activity (e.g. responded to).