People could be encouraged to award points by keeping track of their points awarded, and ratio of questions posted to points awarded. Rewarding these measures creates an appropriate, unobtrusive incentive.

The system can be tuned by varying the tangible rewards attached to points, e.g. as credit toward Premier UT membership - a great idea. But then there is the more subjective, intangible side of the equation. It may well be that many, if not most people would be more motivated by a fair system of recognition than they are motivated by tangible rewards.

I haven't formed my own conclusions about UT's points system, but my feelings about it are generally favorable, and I have no reservations about applauding the experiment. It's a bold, innovative idea, and very impressive how such an extension was seamlessly added into the already awesome UT discussion system. I'll be interested to see where this feature goes.

P.S.: A small request to those who have started getting topic into this under the VFP Marketing Plan thread - let's try to move the discussion about UT points out of that thread, please.

Mike