A few years ago I developed an add-on for Community Server 2.0 to automatically submit contributions to the Community Credit website.

Yesterday I finally found the time to test it with the latest version of Community Server (version 2007), I made some small changes and published it on my public code repository on Google Code.

How does it work?

For those who don't know what Community Credit is I suggest he goes and visit the site and the post I wrote about it more than a year ago "Get Credits for you Community involvement".

The main concept behind Community Credit is that when you contribute to the .NET community you earn some points based on the category of your contribution. But to earn the points you have to submit your contribution to the site. In some categories contributions happen once in a while (like "Attend to MIX 08" or "Received an MVP Designation" or "Start a User Group"), in other like "Blog about something" and "Post a reply on a Discussion Board" they might happen more frequently so going each time to the submission page can become tedious. That's why the Community Credit add-on for CS exists: every time you write a blog post, reply to a thread on a forum or write a comment to a blog post the add-on automatically notifies Community Credit of the event, and you get the points without going to the submission page and inserting the url, title, date and category of your post.

In detail at the moment the Add-On manages 4 categories:

  • if you write a blog post your contribution will receive 500 points
  • if you write a comment to a blog post you get 100 points
  • if you ask a question on a forum (you start a new thread) you get 25 points
  • if you answer a question on a forum you get 75 points

How to install the Add-On

  • Download the compiled Add-On from my Google Code repository.
  • Unzip the file in a directory of your choice and copy the 2 assemblies (CommunityCredit.CommunityServer2007.SubmissionAddOn.dll and CommunityCredit.CommunityServer2007.SubmissionAddOn.XmlSerializers.dll) in the \bin folder of your Community Server installation (if installed in the default location it will be C:\Program Files\Telligent\Community Server 2007\Web\bin)
  • Add a new CSModule into the communityserver.config file 
<add name = "CommunityCreditPointSubmission"
    type = "CommunityCredit.CommunityServer2007.SubmissionAddOn.CommunityCreditPointSubmission, 
   CommunityCredit.CommunityServer2007.SubmissionAddOn">            
  <AffiliateKey Value="[YourKeyHere]"/>
  <AffiliateCode Value="[YourCodeHere]"/>
  <Trace Value="true"/>
</add>

In order to get the AffiliateKey and AffiliateCode you have to register as Affiliate to Community Credit: the Affiliate Key is the one you specify on the form, while the Code will be sent to you by email after the registration.

The Trace element turns on and off the tracing to a text file: useful when trying to troubleshoot in case something doesn't work. It traces to a file named CommCreditSubmissionModule.txt in the \bin folder, so make sure the user on which the CS is running under is allowed to write to that folder.

What's next

But what if your post is not just a post, but is something more? For example an Announcement or a Software Review?

I'm working on a new version of the Add-On that will allows you to specify which kind of contribution you are adding, so if you are writing a blog post about the Tech Event you attended the day before you will be able to specify it and get 1000 points instead of 500. You will be able to do this by tagging your posts with some specific tags.

If you want to have a look at the code, it is available on the subversion repository on GoogleCode, and if you have any feedback, questions, desiderata, just let me know.

Update: I update the link to the source code after I reorganized my repository