Why reward feedback at all
Most feedback boards are busy for a fortnight and quiet after that. The people who post once and hear nothing back stop posting, and the board drifts towards whoever is loudest. Rewards give the quieter, steadier contributors a reason to come back, and they make the contribution visible: a level next to a name tells everyone else on the board who has been helping.
How a contributor moves up
Points accrue for posting, voting, commenting and receiving votes, and in larger amounts when the team moves someone's idea to Planned and again when it ships. Your customers earn them; your own team members do not. A streak shows how many weeks in a row someone has contributed, and a How points work page on your board explains the rules to everyone.
As lifetime points build, contributors climb five levels at 50, 250, 1,000 and 2,500 points, named Newcomer, Contributor, Regular, Champion and Legend unless you rename them. Spending points in the store never lowers a level.
Shipping closes the loop for the contributor as well as the voter. When a request ships, its followers are notified, the person whose idea it was earns the shipped-idea award, which is the largest by default, and the people who voted for it earn a small bonus.
What points buy
The store lists the rewards you set up, each with a points price: a discount or licence code, a link, or a perk your team delivers by hand, such as early access to a beta, a mention in the changelog or a call with the team. New workspaces start with a few example perks as drafts, so nothing is on offer until you publish it.
Redemptions above a points threshold, 500 by default, wait for a teammate to approve them, and you can set how old an account must be, how many active days it needs and how many redemptions a day it may make before it can spend. Bounties add extra points to one request until a deadline: people press I'm in, and the team picks the winner. Referral links pay the referrer once the person they invited posts or votes, after a holding period.
Keeping it honest
A points system invites gaming, so the guards are on by default. Daily earning caps, per action and in total, stop any one account from piling up points, and points from a brand-new account are held for 24 hours. When a moderator removes a post or comment as spam, the points it earned are taken back; a plain delete takes nothing. When a post is merged into another as a duplicate, its author's points for it are taken back, while voters keep theirs, and a person who voted on both posts is counted once.
A fraud check runs every day and flags patterns such as serial voting, pairs of people voting for each other, accounts hitting their caps, and contributors who share an email domain with your team. Flags land in a Fraud review tab, where you dismiss them or act on them, and admins can reverse or adjust points with a note. A monthly look at the leaderboard is enough to spot a cap that needs lowering.
Setting point values: an example
Every amount is yours to set, so the useful question is the ratio between them. The defaults are one starting point: a vote given earns 1 point, a comment 2, a post 5, an idea moved to Planned 25 and a shipped idea 100. Under that scale, a customer whose single request ships out-earns someone who clicked through fifty votes, which is the behaviour a feedback board should reward.
Pair the scale with the daily earning caps, which are on by default, and look at the leaderboard after the first month. If the people at the top are the ones whose requests you shipped, the scale is working; if they are the most frequent voters, lower the vote value.
Coming soon
These are planned for rewards but are not available yet, so nothing on this page depends on them. Where something that ships today covers part of the need, it follows the item. This page will say when each one arrives.
Physical rewards such as merchandise, and gift cards, in the store. Today: load gift card or voucher codes you have bought as a code reward, or offer merchandise as a perk your team sends by hand.
Weighting votes by a customer's plan or revenue. None yet: every vote counts once, whatever the voter's level. Levels and the leaderboard recognise your most active contributors, and tagging posts by plan or account shows which customers are asking.