New Prosper Forum Becomes Reality

With the site upgrade tonight Prosper announced a new forum. Here is the official announcment…

Dear Prosper Community,

Today we are announcing the start of a new discussion forum system that will replace the existing forums. The forums were established to help guide and construct a new marketplace for lending among people. After 18 months and nearly 400,000 posts, there have been great contributions – some of the data analysis and recommendations have been superb and have served as the basis for much of the evolution of Prosper.

We set up the new forum to encourage a broad collective of ideas to flourish. The new forum will be a place for members to connect with other members to learn more about Prosper and how to use the site. Prosper will moderate the forum: however, the way members communicate with each other on the forum is a cooperative effort.

The new system will ensure there is relevance in the discussion to all areas related to Prosper and P2P lending. It also delivers on many of the features regular forum members have requested since our launch in February 2006. For example, only lenders will be able to post to the lender discussion forum. The system will also increase accountability to participants. User handles on the forums will now be the same as handles on the marketplace – a feature many long-time forum users have asked of us. New forum policies have been created to foster an environment of constructive dialog for all members.We welcome and encourage members to repost their ideas and topics in the new forum which most closely matches your topic. For those of you who are interested in discussing matters outside of P2P lending, we encourage you to use other social networks dedicated to those topics.

Best regards,

Chris Larsen

CEO

Forum posting is tied to your Prosper ID. (No more sockpuppets!)

I did a quick test post and it appears (at least in the developer forum) that all posts are moderated. If this is true on all the boards, I don’t know how they will keep up.

There also appears to be some sort of karma (SMF forum terminalogy) based points system…

The Prosper Forum Points System was created to encourage active and positive participation on our member discussion forums where members can lend a hand and connect with other Prosper members. With this system, the more points you earn by helping other users, the higher member level you will be – so post and reply often and constructively. The points system is as follows:

The Prosper Forum Points System

Post Factor – 5 points. This is the number of points each post is worth.

Reply Factor – 10 points. This is the number of points each reply to the original post is worth.

Replier Factor – 1 point. This is the amount each unique replier will give to the original poster.

Rating Factor – 10 points. This is the amount each rating will be worth for the rated post.

Favorite User Factor – 10 points. This is the amount that each user will receive for being selected as a favorite.

Rater Factor – 1 point. This is the amount that each rating will be worth for the rater.

It will be interesting to see how this new forum interacts compared with the last forum. For those indoctrinate, the old forums could get done right nasty. I hope these are a friendlier place.