Member of the Month

Description
This plugin allows you to setup a collaborative environment where some users can vote and rewards people who contribute significantly in the last month. As an administrator, you can define which user groups will be allowed to express their preferences.

In the last week of each month, users are allowed to express their feelings and to start to give some points for other friends. Based on these points a predefined task (which runs on the first day of each month) will build a top and assign rewards. As rewards, we have integration with NewPoints.

List of Features
Collaborative environment. The top is based on multiple user votes.
Setting for specifying user groups allowed to express their vote.
Each vote is totally private.
The ability to announce winners through a public thread. The thread is published automatically each month.
Setting for specifying a validation limit. You have the ability to set a percentage of users who must voted in a month to validate the result.
The ability to keep history of winners in time and to give them bonuses based on this.
Integration with NewPoints plugin developed by Pirata Nervo.
Support for adding your own language.
Performance was increased by using caching mechanisms for obtaining data.
How to Install
The following steps are required to be able to install this product:
Upload the entire content of the directory 'Upload' on your server. When you upload the files, you need to keep the structure suggested.
Go to page: Admin Control Panel > Configuration > Plugins and continue by installing and activating 'Member of the Month' plugin.
If the installation process is marked as done, you can continue by changing plugin behavior using: Admin Control Panel > Configuration > Settings > Member of the Month settings.
Thanks for using it.
How It Works
Bonus Factor
This chapter explains how bonus factor feature works. The plugin comes up with a setting which allows specifying a bonus factor depth. In fact, the setting lets the system to look into history stats and to give awards multiplicated when a user has consecutive appearances there. Let's assume that you set the value of this setting to 3 (months) and the history for a user U is the following one:
July (current month) - User U obtained 2nd place in the top
June (from history) User U obtained 3rd place in the top
May (from history) User U no prize obtained
April (from history) User U obtained 1st place in the top
In this case, the bonus factor will be calculated as:
BF = 1 [for July as current month] + (1 / (1 + 3 [the place obtained])) [for June] + 0 [for May]
BF = 1 + = 1.25
If integration with NewPoints is enabled and the 2nd place should receive 50 points, then the number of points received in this case will be 62.5 (50 x 1.25).

Lets analyze another scenario. The setting is still on 3 months but we have another user (J) with the following stats:
July (current month) User J obtained 1st place
June (from history) User J obtained 3rd place
May (from history) User J obtained 1st place
April (from history) User J obtained 1st place
March (from history) User J obtained 3st place
In this case, the bonus factor will be calculated as:
BF = 1 [for July as current month] + (1 / (1 + 3 [the place obtained])) [for June] + (1 / (1 + 1 [the place obtained])) [for May]
BF = 1 + + =1.75
If integration with NewPoints is enabled and the 1st place should receive 100 points, then the number of points received in this case will be 175 (100 x 1.75).