Board Thread:Site Discussions/@comment-5075791-20130930211124/@comment-167456-20131007115221

SplashTheHedgehog wrote: Can you you reexplain what you mean Morff?

I'll try. The idea of Emerald Awards is to reward users and celebrate their good work. We do this by giving out awards once a month in specific categories (one in each category), that are voted on by users. However, some people haven't embraced the idea because of risks of bias in the voting and competition/jealousy among people that don't win.

Barnstars (on Wikipedia) are also used to rewards users and celebrate their good work. However, rather than giving out awards once a month, they are given out whenever someone does someting good, by anyone. The person who gives one out has to say why it was given (i.e. what the user did that was good). Because anyone can give one out, and they can be given out more than once a month, and there are no strict rules behind the giving, there is no risk of competition.

I haven't given much thought to how it would work here, but I'm sure there's a way of taking the best of both and putting them together so that they work for SNN.