TON Foundation is announcing a reward program to incentivize community activity and engagement on StackOverflow. We want to help the community build a TON knowledge library on StackOverflow so that any developer can ask and answer questions about TON. We want to build this on StackOverflow for several reasons:

Strong search engine optimization, which translates to better search engine results

StackOverflow dominates web search results. When any developer (from TON-curious to TON-native) uses Google to search, we want them to find an answer efficiently on the first page. We cannot expect TON to become a leading layer-1 blockchain without such a knowledge-base optimization.

Reuse old answers to help new people

Developers are usually struggling with similar issues and problems. We want to avoid a scenario where developers get stuck and ask a previously answered question if they can find an archived answer easily.

Questions asked on developer chats get washed down the drain

Most of the TON dev community is asking questions in the various Telegram chat groups. Questions asked there get buried in the chat stream. It becomes difficult to search for old answers and all the valuable knowledge does not get archived for later efficient search.

Here is the concept:

1. Every first working day of the month, we will reward with Toncoin and special NFTs the top 10 most active people who answer questions and the top 3 questions* for the trailing 30-days with the TON tag from the dashboard.
*Please note that the top winners will be subject to post-moderation in order to prevent cheating.

2. Use only the [TON] tag — please, do not add any sub-tags. Avoid creating sub-tags that will branch out the taxonomy. For example, do not add [func], [fift], [toncli], etc. We want to concentrate all efforts in the same place to reach the critical mass faster. We will encourage the use of [TON] tag + specific word search in the title. Thus, questions should have a comprehensive title that covers the respective topic(s).

3. To participate and get rewarded in the program, you need to log in to a special bot through your StackOverflow account. The bot will let the TON Foundation team know the wallet addresses of the top authors to reward them. It will be available in the second half of September. Starting now, you may answer and ask questions, and log in to the bot later.

The Toncoin amount will be determined by the position. 1,020 TON will be awarded among the top 10 answers:

1. 300 TON
2. 200 TON
3. 100 TON
4. 90 TON
5. 80 TON
6. 70 TON
7. 60 TON
8. 50 TON
9. 40 TON
10. 30 TON

And 120 TON for the top 3 questions:

1. 60 TON
2. 40 TON
3. 20 TON

Let’s grow the TON database of knowledge together 🤗