GMAT Math

Guys, this is such a great forum because of the contributors who positively and meaningfully add to the discussion. I am so disappointed to see a large number of meaningless comments that a few relatively new members leave behind in order to rack up the number of posts. If you share my frustration, please comment here to let the moderators of the forum know how we feel about the new beatthegmat.
To those who comment here without adding value: is a free class really worth it? (it's a rhetorical question. no need to reply).

Hi there. Thanks for your message and for being concerned about the quality of the community on BTG. More importantly, thanks for your great contributions - I just read through a lot of your recent posts in the Problem Solving forum. Eric and I have heard similar things from several of our members. And we take this issue seriously.

Eric and I have personally read a bunch of messages that the most active members have posted. Many of them do provide good info. But there are definitely some non-value added messages, which are presumably being posted to win. Eric, I and the rest of the moderators are in the process of figuring out the best way to keep the good (lots of messages with useful info) while minimizing the bad (non-value added messages posted solely to increase the count).

We will let you know what we decide to do by posting a reply to this topic by Monday at the latest. Thanks for your patience. And thanks again for your contributions and care!

I have an idea: why don't you reward people who receive the most 'thanks' from the community?

djkvakin wrote:I have an idea: why don't you reward people who receive the most 'thanks' from the community?

People will not be smart enough to collude and inflate/deflate thanks? it might lead to other problems such as multiple accounts etc. also. I see implementation problems in making the new suggestion work

ajith wrote:

djkvakin wrote:I have an idea: why don't you reward people who receive the most 'thanks' from the community?

People will not be smart enough to collude and inflate/deflate thanks? it might lead to other problems such as multiple accounts etc. also. I see implementation problems in making the new suggestion work

________________________

Also,it can lead to friends sending thanks to each other for no reason and thus increasing their count.

Also,as ajith said that it might lead to other problems such as multiple accounts .

On another note,I have seen that many a times people write:-

Thanks xyz for your problem approach.I really appreciate the shortcut technique applied by you.

But,they don't thank him/her by clicking on the "Thanks!" button.So, I also see that there might me some implementation problems.

According to me the best way is that the moderators of beat the gmat should check the replies and mark it as good or bad and remove the count of bad posts from the members who are posting... In this way the contest would be fair.

putting any criteria like most thanks etc would create a no. of new loopholes and false identities.

Thanks everyone for your comments. We're not going to change the rules of the competition because that wouldn't be right or fair to the members who have invested their time to post content to our community. And so the competition will continue.

As I wrote before, the moderators have personally read a lot of the posts that the most active members have posted. From our perspective, most of the posts are helpful, and the community has benefited from these posts. That being said, there are some posts that are not so helpful. The moderators have been discussing the best way in which to steer our active members to post more helpful messages. We will let you know what we are doing by tomorrow.

On a final note, I wanted to let you know that we have discussed recognizing the members who get the most thanks. We're not sure about the best way to do it yet. But will keep you posted on how we do that as well!

As promised, here's an update on the program. Eric, the rest of the BTG moderator team and I decided to send out an email to all of the most active members on BTG. We wanted to gently remind everyone of the rules of the competition, which include removal from the lists for posting too many short or redundant messages. I hope that this will help us see more of the good posts and less of the bad ones.

Here is the email that I sent out. As you will see, I even explicitly referenced this thread within the email. Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

---- Email to all most active Beat The GMAT members ----

Subject: Important message regarding Beat The GMAT's Giant GMAT Giveaway Program

Hi there,

I'm David, one of the administrators of Beat The GMAT. I'm sending this email out to all of our most active members on Beat The GMAT recently. My apologies for the form email, but I wanted to get an important message out about the Giant GMAT Giveaway promotion as quickly as possible.

Thank you very much for all your contributions to the community! One of the things that makes Beat The GMAT unique is that it features a ton of great community members who generously spend time to help one another learn and succeed in b-school admissions.

You may have noticed that we launched a program called the Giant GMAT Giveaway in late January. The purpose of this program was to reward our most active community members with cool prizes, as a show of thanks for all your contributions (https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/giant-gmat-giveaway). Overall, the response that we've seen has been positive in that many members are posting lots of valuable posts on a daily basis. But I wanted to give you a heads up that some members have complained that there are more non-value added posts than they'd like (https://www.beatthegmat.com/petition-to- ... 51708.html).

So I'd like to remind all of our top members about the rules for this giveaway (https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/giant-gm ... ant_update), which emphasize the need to post valuable messages rather than just extremely short ones. I don't think that most of our top members have been posting too many non-value added posts. In fact, the Beat The GMAT moderator team has been following our members' posts closely since we launched the program, and we think that most of the posts are good.

In order to address our other members' concerns during the final two weeks of the Giveaway promotion, however, we're sending out this reminder that we are reviewing all top members' posts and will weed out people who appear to be abusing the system by our standards. Examples of abuse include: too many one-word responses, or tons of topics that consist of just copying and pasting old questions featured in the forums. We've already caught a couple of people attempting to manipulate the rules and removed them from the leaderboard. Here is an example (https://www.beatthegmat.com/member76343.html).

Given all the effort that you all have put into posting in the Beat The GMAT community, we'd really hate to have to take action on any of our top members.

Now that this unpleasantness is out of the way, I'd like to thank you all again for being active contributors to Beat The GMAT. I look forward to following your stories and seeing you succeed in your MBA journey!


All the best,
David

Hi All,

I'm writing to followup on this topic. As I wrote in my previous message, I sent out an email with a gentle reminder to all of our top members recently. I wanted to let everyone know that I also sent a much stronger warning to one individual today. Below is the text of the warning. Please note that the BTG moderator team came very close to disqualifying this individual. In the end, we opted to send a warning instead.

Please let me know if you have any questions.


---- Warning to a BTG Member

Hi,

I'm writing to follow up on a broader email that I sent out to all of our most active members. As you saw in that email, the Beat The GMAT team has received complaints from other members about the fact that some members are posting lots of messages that aren't helpful.

Several moderators, including me, have personally reviewed many of the messages that you've posted on Beat The GMAT. And we're concerned about the quality of these posts because most of the posts are very short posts where you either: 1) re-post a topic/question that has already been posted in the past, 2) state your opinion about the right answer without providing any details or 3) ask a simple followup question without adding any value (e.g., "can you explain your answer?").

The Beat The GMAT moderator team debated whether we should simply disqualify you from the competition all together. But we opted, instead, to send you a strong warning. If you'd like to be eligible for the Giant GMAT Giveaway, you'll need to make sure that your posts are helpful by following these guidelines:

1. Search whether a question has already been posted on BTG forum before posting it.

2. Post details about why you think a specific answer is the right one.

3. Don't ask simple followup questions.

We understand that some posts are going to be short simply because you're participating in a conversation. And so we're OK with some posts being short. But we'll need to disqualify you if the great majority of your posts are like that.

On a final note, I wanted to let you know that the BTG moderator team will be reviewing your posts at the end of this week. If we notice the same issues with your posts, then we will disqualify you from the competition without further warning.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

David

Thank you! This is why we all love this forum so much.

No prob. We do take the quality of posts very seriously. And thank you again for your great posts!

I have a question, why are the guys in the math forum allowed to post the same solution to a problem consecutively without any new information or insight? It seems a little ridiculous.

Also,
it appears some members are still being abusive. Please see example below:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/dairy-t52290.html#223690

djkvakin wrote:Also,
it appears some members are still being abusive. Please see example below:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/dairy-t52290.html#223690

If you meant me, I was referring to what is going on here and It is a serious problem though on the face value it looks silly. Now that you have brought it forward let us discuss that and I want to know the official view also on this.

Hi All,

As I wrote before, we take the quality of posts here seriously. Just posting tons and tons of questions, many within the same minute, violates the spirit of the competition. Our original intent was to reward members who are contributing a lot to the community by participating in conversations and helping other members.

I just sent warnings to several members who were violating the spirit of the competition and told them that they will be disqualified if they continue. Please let me know if you have any questions.

David