internetpoints

Introduction

internetpoints is a web application & cron job that can be used to give "internet points" to users according to their contributions on a mailing-list. This is inspired by the reputation system of Stack Overflow.

The idea here is to motivate people to solve problem by making them compete for rewards, that are worth different amount of points.

How it works

The software has several parts:

• a getter that downloads emails, organize them in threads and puts them in a database;
• a "voting" interface that allows trusted users to choose, for each thread, which poster gets what kind of award;
• a score summary that displays the score of each mailing-list member (and other statistics).

It is written in Python 2.7 and uses Flask (web framework), SQLAlchemy (database toolkit) and the standard email and poplib modules to get messages from a POP3 server.

Installation

Clone this repository and copy the file config.py.example to config.py, then edit it as needed. Use cron to run the internetpoints.getter module periodically, e.g.:

python -m internetpoints.getter

Then configure your web server to serve the WSGI application internetpoints.wsgi:application. For testing/development purposes, you can use Twisted's twistd tool to run it from a terminal:

twistd web --wsgi internetpoints.wsgi.application