Well the contribution count is certainly not supposed to reset. I have asked our programmers to take a look at this. At first glance this does not seem to happen in our old test accounts. But there can be explanations for that. So they will investigate a bit further.

Meanwhile, could you maybe tell me a bit more about the problem as you have experienced it? Did the count completely reset (to zero) or did the count just decrease? Are your contributions still visible in the forums?

I made lets say +40 contributions.
And it shows in profile now around 20 after a while of inactivity.

The only place where i have seen the numbers.

Its quite obvious.
I have 27 best post awards and 22 most liked comments, but only 22 contributions left in profile.

So, can you see it?

This is a bit tricky. Sorry I did not keep you updated sooner. OOur programmers are working on it but have not found any definitive answer yet.

OK, we have looked further into this. But we cannot recreate the problem. Could you send me the profile name you are refering to? (Best send it to admin@investigatenorth.com rahter than post it here) Sorry I did not think to ask you that before.

Only thing I can say for now is, that we are not seeing this for any of our old profiles. But that may just indicate a rare problem.

OK. Talked further with the programmers about this. Actually I am a bit embarassed that I could not figure this out on my own. But the fact is that our moderators do delete posts after a while if they do not generate any likes or comments. This is necessary in order to avoid having these posts completely fill up the forums. And this will decrease the contribution count since this is re-calculated when you call that stat based on your actual current posts. So I think that is definitely the cause of this.

As a side note, we are actually talking about automating this function. In this case we should obviously do a better job of communicating this to the players.

This is communicated in the opposite way, especially when the advertising says: The database and that everyone can participate in it is to make sure that the truth can not be hidden by someone....
And then come the administrators and delete things.
Ironic, isnt it?
Dont know why some kilobytes make you feel the need to delete.

I am disappointed.
At least i opened all nodes.

Well that is a very good question. This is something we have discussed at length when we designed Cloud Chamber, and a discussion that we are very interested in. So I would like to just sum up our thoughts on this.

Firstly, it is not the physical storage of the information that is the problem. We could easily handle that. It is the ability of the players to process all that information. If we do not give the forums the ability to "forget" some of the information produced over the course of time, that information will gradually pile up in a way that would make it practically impossible for the players to interact with anything but the most recently produced posts anyway. In this scenario, your posts might still be in there somewhere, but they would be hidden so deep in piles of other posts, that the chances of somebody actually reading them would be almos non-existing.

One of the basic design principles behind Cloud Chamber is, that information overload can hide the truth just as effectively as deleting it would. So we have to be able to sort the information somehow. The whole landscape metaphor of the database is also an attempt to solve this problem by elevating some files rather than others. It works because it is a selection of information (and therefore necessarily a de-selection of other information). The important question is just who gets to decide what is important and what is not.

Our attempt to answer this question is to crowdsource the investigation and let the players decide what is important. Rather than having some central gatekeeper decide what the truth is, we try to leave it up to the players. So even though it is our moderators that does the actual deletion, they only do so on the basis of player input. They are only deleting posts that other players are not reacting to.

We think this approach is true to the spirit of Cloud Chamber. But we are certainly interested in ther points of view.

The problem with this approach is, that its still also required to have posts waiting for reaction to enable nodes.

Also i think, the PERSONAL list of made posts, "reacted to" posts, "commented on" posts, should be in separated tabs. The combined list is just piling everything in one pile. Your actions, others votes, your votes, comments, own comments.
You dont even have an overview of your own walkthrough. Just a pile. Like, you have to guess which was the last NEW event in the list.

Conclusion from this, if there was a GENERAL tab as well for "not reacted to" posts in each node, the problem would vanish.