You can watch a screencast that I made, that I think demonstrates the functionality a little better than this summary

Problem

Sometimes, on a popular Confluence instance, it's hard to recognise what content is useful and productive, and what should be ignored. You can see this problem on any page or news post that has a lot of comments.

Proposed solution

What I came up with is a bastard child of content modding and karma. I suppose the fact that my project has no strong focus on a single feature is a weak point of my FedEx.

Usage/Features

Giving karma – Hover over a user's profile, and click +1 or -1

Giving points to a page – Click the up arrow next to the page's points counter

Finding out your (or others' karma) – Go to their profile page

Bringing up the highest voted threads – Click "Sort by digg weight"

What it looks like

I find pictures speak better than words (all features I incorporated are demonstrated here):

Regular Confluence display page screen

User profile screen

Assumptions/Design choices

Here are a few choices I made, and the reasons for them:

• Karma is only added for comments and news posts – my reasoning is that no one really owns a page, and therefore shouldn't receive karma for it. Comments and news posts, however, have a real sense of ownership.

• Pages and blog posts cannot be down-modded – no particular reason

• Hovering over profile picture – It feels like you're giving or taking karma for that person's comment

• +1 and -1 – Saying +1 and -1, or variations of it is popular amongst Atlassians on our internal wiki. Of course, this UI could be replaced with up/down arrows, up/down thumbs, it could really be skinnable, too.

• You can only vote once, and not on your own content – Obvious

• You can not remove karma from comments that are over a week old (not implemented) – So that you can't take karma from a particular user by looking for all their old comments

Design problems

In hindsight (and actually while I was creating it), I realised my modifications had an identity crisis. Various references to "digg", "karma" and "moderate"/"mod" didn't help at all.

"Who dugg this?" should probably be changed to "Who gave karma?"

"Sort by digg weight should be changed to "Sort by relevance"

Future uses

There are all sorts of cool uses for this kind of data:

• Macro – Show on your own pages (or dashboard) content that you gave points to, for reference later
• Popular pages – All-time favourites, or for the past x-days, etc etc etc
• Popular users – Users with good karma
• Bad boys (and girls) – Satanic users
• Controversial material – Comments or users with the most karma against them (i.e. both positive and negative)

Conclusion and critical reception

For my first real FedEx, I think I got quite a few features out of the way, and I'm happy with how much I got through.

Apparently a lot of people voted for it, and I just missed out on the finals, so a few people must have thought it'd be useful.

Some don't see the point of such a system in Confluence, however I think with some UI tweaks, it could prove to be useful on instances that have a lot of traffic (especially with comment participation).

I could see it being either a plugin to Confluence or being a global option (by default off?).