Re^4: More PM stats analysis on new levels

[QM]

Id have to think a bit on how to present the info so that it doesn't tell you each nodes rep exactly, but does allow you to do your stats.

How about adding random noise to the XP of each post? Use some rather large uniform distribution (say +/-100?), but don't report the size of the distribution. As long as the mean remains relatively unchanged, the stats should too. Or choose a different distribution. This would suffer from rough guesses about the size of the distribution based on the largest negative value, and some of the lowest scoring nodes could be guessed.

Another idea is to take nodes in pairs at random, and shuffle their XP up a little. If two nodes have 17 and 48 XP, change them randomly by +/-5, so that the sum is still the same.

Do this randomly across many pairs (not necessarily all), such that most nodes have changed only slightly. Then each slice of the XP distribution should be stable, and guessing XP is much harder for low scoring nodes.

If xdg is going to use post order, or distinguish between different "grades" of XP, then the distribution must be chosen more carefully. After all, a Max or Min XP stat would be meaningless, and a plot of XP by post order, or XP by calendar date might be bogus.

Update: You can only give this out a few times. After the 5th or 10th set, a node's average XP tends to settle down. Unless you can come up with wildly differing distributions every time.

[xdg]

How about adding random noise to the XP of each post

Careful with terminology here. Users have XP. Posts have reputation.

I really wouldn't need per-post reputation for what I was thinking of doing if I can get the aggregate statistics I mentioned.