We're adding a few new features to the site to make it easier to find stuff and discuss gaming with the people you most care about within our utopian and phallus-referencing community. I'm sure a few of you have also noticed that we've added a leaderboard and a new friends tab up top. 

What's Niero up to, you say?  Why must he constantly take my cheese and move it? I'll do my best to explain the new features below and will update this post on a regular basis as the rules of the leader board may change over time.

August 21, 2007 - Old wise seldom-speaking stereotypical sensai patch implemented

Anti-Trolling was added to the algorithm.  Unlike most places, your score can actually go DOWN at Destructoid.  We won't rob you of points for inactivity or any nonsense like that. Instead, we've taken measures to promote quality conversation among the community.  In a basic sense we do this by giving people more points for popular contributing activities divided by the total number of feedback activities.  In other words, you can blog a lot of but if nobody has much to say about your posts, you don't score as high. Inversely, if you rarely speak but are acclaimed when doing so, your score goes up.  Hence the name of the patch.

August 20, 2007 - Leaderboards Introduced! 

We'll surely be using these for prizes and privileges in the future as well as power and women! For the moment they're just for a little competitive fun amongst us regulars.  Here's how they work:

Destructoid Rank!

A number that represents how active and recognized you are within the Destructoid community.  This is a combination of two things: actions performed (comments, etc) and your personal popularity.  We primarily gauge popularity based on how many *unique IP addresses* have read your blog or stories you've had promoted to the home page. We decided not to do it by how many readers or friends a person has to discourage the creation of fake accounts of adding people to your friends list that you don't really care about.  This number goes up naturally by being active in the community.

Destructoid Score! 

An algorithm that takes into account how many actions you've performed on the site and gives each one a point value.  For example: a home page post is worth more than a forum post.   The number is then compiled and sorted to determine your Destructoid Rank.  Notice anything funny about the last digit of the score?

Leaderboard???

Updated daily, this leaderboard is a list of the top all-around community members. In some cases it may be a 24 hour delay because it has to look at every single blog post on the site and calculate what it contributes to each person's score.  It's going to be a slow process until we can set up a beowulf cluster of PSTriples. 

Forum posts

The amount of forum posts you've started and responded to.  If you see a zero there and have posted in the forum before, it means your accounts aren't linked yet.  Email niero [at] destructoid [dot] com two links:  one to your Cblogs profile page and another to your forum profile page. 

Page views (or) Profile Views

How many times your personal blog or profile page has been accessed by other readers.  This number dramatically goes up when your stories appear on the home page, obviously, or when you get your articles linked by sites like Digg or CollegeHumor, etc. Linking to your blog from your other sites is the fastest way to improve your score, obviously.  Writing about popular games that people are searching for on Google is also beneficial.

Unique IPs 

This is the unique identifier of a computer or aggregate ISP on the internet.  In other words, a person could create 100 reader accounts on their PC  but only be awarded 1 point for that IP. 

Dtoid Army Badges

Top secret classified information!  These will be revealed in time.... hell, the code isn't even written for that yet.  It's just an idea dancing around in my pants at the moment.