Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » KUDOS. And why it needs a tweak.

So a moderator deleted my kudos based on the fact that it was too short. As I'm friends with the person I'd given it to, I'm very much aware that my 'short kudos' was an incredibly accurate description of their character, though not entirely novel-length and, though the pop-up system was implemented, I must have missed the section that stated short kudos would be deleted (if it was mentioned, at all).
A friendly PM directing me to where that was mentioned would be nice; I double-checked the rules and found nothing.

In addition, I've seen several characters (and players) with kudos as short as, or shorter, than the one I gave that haven't been deleted either because no one's found them yet or some other reason. I don't really care. I'd link a bunch of them, but that's not why I'm here (and that'd only inspire negativity on something that doesn't need to be so); I'm not posting this to scream bloody murder about a moderator who deleted my kudos or complain about the others who haven't had theirs combed through.

I'm here because I have a suggestion on how to make it easier for mods and users alike:

Perhaps, instead of a pop-up reminding people to give longer kudos, a length requirement would work much better. All kudos would reach a certain length easily and a simple database clean or something thereabouts to remove all kudos under this limit from RPR altogether would fix the problem fairly well. Nobody'd be singled out for having given a character short kudos recently and all previous iterations would be wiped out. It would be less taxing on any moderators, as well, as they'd have less kudos to comb through and it would also decrease the chance of personal bias leaving any given section of kudos intact.

I'm not mad at the moderator who deleted it or anything, of course, they were just doing their job! I'm just fuming that my kudos wasn't "good enough" to stay when several one-word comments or irrelevant kudos (that I refrain from posting to prevent this from becoming vastly off-topic) had every apparent right to.

It just seems a little faulty to me, or that it could at least be handled better.

(Like, leaving the kudos and handing out a warning instead, then deleting if the activity persists?)

I think there's some misunderstanding here about the reason why it was deleted! It was never because the kudos was too short, because we don't want kudos to be a certain length. Kudos were put into place to be like recommendations to other players, and therefore need to include why other people should talk to and roleplay with that person.

If your kudos was deleted, then usually it means that it didn't sound like a recommendation at all and more like a totally random comment that made no sense to us (it felt like you were recommending not to talk to this person!). Often we ask users to edit their kudos to amend it, but usually we do this when they say "Such and so is awesome!" and it's unclear why they're so awesome. If your kudos was a little indirect, it may have read very different than you intended. There is nothing stopping you from writing a more direct, recommending kudos for that person though. We'd certainly love to see it!

We don't require a certain length because it doesn't take a minimum of 140 characters to write a good kudos. "X has a great sense of humor, love our funny RPs!" is a good enough kudos for us, because it's a very good recommendation and reason for another player to talk to them. We can deduce they like to have roleplays with humor and/or comedy in it for instance. That's what we look for in kudos.

Edit: Also, if you find kudos that are not adequate enough for these standards, please send us a PM!! We try to monitor everything as good as we can, but we do sometimes miss something. We'll take care of these as soon as we can.

Eh, well that kind of bums me out, really. /:
Just makes me want to give kudos to people less because what I could view as legitimate, accurate kudos could just end up being deleted later because someone else's personal opinion says otherwise.

I had a similar thing happen to me.
I wrote "Miss you." or "Youre awesome!" as a kudos - but thats stuff that belongs into a guestbook and not to recommend a player. I did not realize it until a mod told me and asked me nicely to edit it. I think the decision of the mod was right. If i want to tell a person she or he is awesome, Ill tell them via PM. If the person is a good rper, or has awesome and unique characters, I mention that for other players in the kudos.

I know I'm kinda being a broken record since a lot of this has already been said, but!

Kudos serve a dual purpose:

1. Giving the player encouragement and feedback that they are doing something good, and
2. Helping other players find new RP partners whose styles they will enjoy, whether that be great character design, a delightful OOC personality, whatever.

They often get used more like guestbook comments, with super-personal or super-vague comments that serve only point 1, not point 2. We much prefer to see those things as guestbook comments, PMs, forum posts, whatever, especially with new systems on the way that make kudos a little more central to the process of locating new players.

We analyzed all the kudos that didn't really work very well as a recommendation, and found that almost always, they were very short. We also found that there were some short kudos that worked just fine. So I implemented a prompt on short kudos that asks players to double-check themselves. Here is the actual text of the pop-up prompt:

A person can then respond that they forgot, and be given the chance to edit before sending, or say that they remembered and post it. By and large, the clarity of kudos has gone WAY up since this prompt was implemented.

So I purposely did not add a length requirement to kudos, because we don't care about length, we just (as outsiders who don't yet know this person) want to know why we should care about this player/character too.

That's probably why you didn't find a rules entry about length. There also isn't a rules-entry about kudos, because they pretty clearly encapsulate their purpose in the prompt question that they ask (which Sanne posted above), as well as the pop-up if an extremely short kudos is triggered, and the rules entry would probably just repeat those.

As a point of interest, the kudos you were talking about in your OP was long enough that it would not have triggered the pop-up prompt, so length was doubly never the question!

We will probably do some news posts with tips about how to write useful kudos, and eventually rework those into tutorials to go into the permanent help section.

You're right that it can be pretty subjective about whether it works as a recommendation! I'm not sure there's a way around that.

You're also right that you "described the character accurately." But the character's profile also describes the character accurately. Maybe if you mention that those personality traits that you were describing are well played? Believably written? Fun to interact with? it would read as a kudos.

If this isn't already hammered in enough, why just tell a person they are awesome? Why not go into the list of reasons why they are awesome?

I'll use Jane as an example of kudo's that explain why.
As seen in this kudo its explained why the person is awesome, form being sweet, smart, witty and looking for what both parties want out of an rp. These are a few reasons why one could recommend her as a good rper, then after that just say whatever nice things you wish