Cheating the point system?
I just found a way to cheat on gaining points. While watching a video in the Learn Spanish section, I accidentally clicked on Continue to Flashcards after only 3 seconds of the video had played. I then noticed that I still got points as if I had watched the entire video.
I feel that something should be done about this. It isn't right that someone could just watch three seconds of a video and then move on and get points for that. Maybe it could be changed so that a certain amount of a video has to be watched before points are awarded?
I don't know if this same thing happens with other parts of the website, but I will check into it now.
EDIT: The same thing happens with all the other Learn Spanish sections.
6 Answers
The learning points don't affect rep. The only person you are cheating are yourself if you don't actually watch the videos because no one cares about that. Putting any effort into "fixing" that would be a ridiculous waste of time and effort.
I don't know why people would be on this site just for the points. I am a competitive person myself, but I realize that just clicking through things to get the points doesn't mean that I learned anything. I would hope that people here would have the same goal of learning and not just trying to achieve some sort of "status".
In the beginning, I believe we had a system in place in which you had to watch the video for at least 5 minutes before getting the points. When we moved the site this summer, we didn't think that this was necessary any more due to may of the reasons users have already sited: it doesn't affect your reputation, it just cheats yourself if you are only in it for the points, etc. And it seems like some people have pretty legitimate reasons for skipping the videos on our site if they have already watched them on an ipod or another site.
It's kind of the same for the speak section. On our old host, all the writing and speaking exercises were available for all users to read/hear and provide feedback on. But really only 2 or 3 people out of the thousands of users actually spent the time to give feedback, and it was taking up a lot of room in the forum, so we cut it out in the move and we trust that people are actually writing/recording something so that they actually practice and learn. If someone just wants to rack up a bunch of learning points for no reason other than to see a big number next to his/her name, then at least they are happy. 
Thanks for pointing this out Edgedonkey. The good news is that no one's reputation can be increased through cheating.
The bad news is that if someone chooses to do that, they are only cheating themselves. I can't imagine wanting to skip one of Paralee's videos! 
Well, I have all of the videos on my ipod from the Spanishdict podcast. I enjoy being able to watch these at any times and I have watched all of the videos. However, I have not got through all of the lessons, so when I am going through the lessons, I like being able to still receive the points for the video without having watched it at that time. I don't always have an extra 10-15minutes to watch the video (example: at school during study hall), so its nice to go straight to the vocabulary.
I have noticed that also, but, it has come in handy, when I just watched the entire video, and then it logged me out, so, it said the points didn't count. Thankfully, all I had to do was login and then just skip the video, yet get all my points back, instead of watching the whole video over again. But, that is the only time that it is beneficial!
