Most webmasters that run the Pligg CMS system have asked many questions about the Karma system associated with user accounts, does this actually work, whats the point of the karma etc, one of the more frequent questions however is “How Come The Karma Values On All Users Say 10″. Read on to find out how to get you users karma to calculate automatically with a cron job.
What is user karma?
Karma takes into account a users submissions, published, queued, and buried stories. It then comes up with a mathematical equation to represent it. In order to utilize Karma.
What Does It Achieve?
Your guess is as good as ours, as far as we can tell it shows a number and has no other function or interaction with users. Even after searching the pligg forums we drew a complete blank on any functions this feature of pligg has or it’s affects on users if any.
Getting Karma To Update Values Daily
To get the karma system to update users values automatically you will need to setup a daily cron job for your site, you can normally do this from you hosting account control panel. If your on a dedicated server without a control panel you will need to know Linux commands.
The file you need to call from the cron job is located at:
http://yoursite.com/libs/karma.php
You could simply call this file a 12pm every evening or whenever you like at multiple instances during the day.
You could also call the URL from the address bar of your browser once per day to achieve the same results.
Karma values will now update after being calculated.
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This post was written by:
Lincoln - who has written 182 posts on Social CMS Buzz.
Founder of Social CMS Buzz and a fan of all things open source, social and design related.
The karma system is one of the long time mysteries of Pligg. No one knows much about it, no one knows who coded it.
If you have a lot of members, I would suggest doing the cron job, and not using your browser window because it can take a few minutes to compile.
Good post Lincoln.
I just noticed that on my ‘Top Users’ section, there is no rhyme nor reason to the order, it should order them by karma. Will need to look into that.