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>>Since most of my stars by assignation, I'm going to be in a big hole :)
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>A big hole? Sounds a little extreme *grin*.
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>The important thing is that people (including you and me) get the help they need...

Actually Nadya (or her boss) seems to be a great source of interesting problems, which is good for many reasons. We usually tend to build our routine work around proven solutions, and design our apps in terms of what we already know how to do. She often comes with interesting new problems, sometimes several times a day. IMO, programming is best defined as "art of problem solving", and she's supplied several very interesting and intriguing ones. Simply trying to solve them may benefit anyone who tries; finding a solution actually benefits anyone who reads.

Thus I'd stay with the following (as for the voting on this):

1) granting a few months free subscription would be at UT's discretion. I'd rather be with the raffle. A slight modification would be that anyone who gets it, would not be considered in the next two or three raffles, but then the points earned meanwhile would count next time.

2) 3:1 rule is more fair to me. One reason I was very shy with giving stars was that I was also getting them at the same time, with a strong feeling I didn't earn them. The other reason is the habit to enjoy solving problems and not bother others with them :). And there should be a limit to the number of assignation stars per thread, dependent on the size of the thread - i.e. if it wouldn't make sense to have the assignator get three points for three answers assigned as help/solution in a thread of only four messages (as is most frequently the case) and in a thread which exceeds 50 messages. The originator has more work to do, tracking the thread and trying out solutions, and should be awarded for the cooperation with the contributors and for coming up with an interesting problem (I wasn't thinking about Nadya here, but yes, that's a good example). What would these limits look like - I'd rather leave to UT administration.

3) Main page list is a matter of recognition; one thing I'd change about it is not to restart it from scratch each month, rather make it Top Ten Last 30 days, pretty much the same way we used to have Top Posters reports.