Two weeks later and a week or so to go, so it’s time to finalise the plan for this years’ BFC.
Taking @DieGrootHammer’s last post as the starting point:
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By “monthly posts” I guess you’re referring to the replies/comments and my initial suggestion of splitting 100 points between all the comments made in the month. I agree that it could land up getting heavily skewed and could result in someone scoring huge numbers. I suggest reducing the total points available for comments to 25 per month. These still to be split on a weighted basis We can reduce this even further if need be.
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Agree that posting main site articles should be the highest scoring activity. I suggest putting the points per article up to 5 points for each published article. Therefore, you could score up to 25 points per month, just from posting 5 articles. New forum Topics to score 1 point each, to a maximum of 10.
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Using a Google sheet (check the testing sheet link below) we’ll be able to heavily reduce the tracking admin by making it a requirement for challengers to self-report each time they publish an article or create a new Topic thread. All participants will have the same access and edit abilities on the sheet, and the sheet itself will always be publicly available. The pain of counting posts monthly does remain the one scoring element that we’ll still have to manage manually. But, I am comfortable with the idea that we take the number from each participant’s Profile Summary at a defined point each new month, and then use those figures to calculate each persons comments and replies for that month.
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I don’t think any of the participants would be silly enough to try to game the system by making a flood of low effort comments. With the reduced points available for comment replies, their time would be better spent writing a decent article. And besides, it would be hugely obvious to everyone what they’re doing. And, as before, the Challenge Commissioner should keep the right to make adjustments and issue possible penalties if need be. I’m not saying that the odd single emoji or one-word posts won’t happen. But if they’re happening too frequently from one person, it could be addressed.
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Still cannot think of any way to incorporate Discord and Discord posting into the BFC mix. Unless anyone else can come up with a workable idea in the next week?
That said, based on something Hammer did say in his comments (“there are many active users on our Discord that never seems to post here”) there is one thing I thought of that we could perhaps do: bonus points for getting new people (from the Discord server or anywhere else) to actually join us here, and take part in the conversations happening here. Call it a New Mewb Referral Bonus. They must introduce themselves in the Welcome Wagon topic and mention that you referred them here. Then, after they’ve made at least < insert appropriate minimum number. 25?> comments on the forum, you can claim X bonus points. Again, we make it self-monitoring, and set a maximum number of new users that you can get points for. Let’s maybe stick to the 5’s - 5 points per referee with a maximum of 5 new people = a maximum of 25 bonus points claimable over the ten-month period?
Finally, I’ve eventually set up a Google Sheet (via Excel) to test the self-reporting and scoring system. Just set up two months in the interim to use for testing. Have filled February with some dummy info, and left March blank for you all to play with. You will need a Google account on order to make edits to the Sheet. The link has been set to View Only so that anyone not in the Challenge can’t inadvertently make changes to the data. 
Once you’ve opened the link with your Google Account signed in, select the “View only” button and then send me an Edit Access request. This way we know only BFC participants and one or two other administrators can access and edit the sheet. Please rename one of the placeholder names in the “Current Points & Rank” block on the main sheet and then use that one for your testing.
Any other thoughts, suggestions, changes you want - please share them here (or on the Google Sheet) as soon as so that we can get things finalised, set up, and ready in time to start next week.