The comment scoring is a reflection of our judging criteria and an attempt to reward valuable contributions and contributors. Defining “valuable” has evolved considerably since the first round and continues to be refined by evaluating how people interact on the site and with the contest. The scoring is not necessarily the same from round to round, so what gets high marks in one round, may not do as well in a subsequent round.
The idea of the contest is to reward those that contribute the most quality content and to a lesser extent quantity, although the two factors are not mutually exclusive and cannot be completely decoupled especially in regards to comments. Because people will change their behavior patterns to optimize for the scoring process, we will not be discussing the details that go into the comment scoring, other than to say this is our best effort yet to try and reward the best contributors.
A few notes to keep in mind.
1.) How many times you comment on a given topic, blog, etc affects the score.
2.) How many comment points you earn in a given time period affects the score.
3.) There is a limit on the number of forum topics that earn points in a given period of time.
