Forum badges system

General CPCWiki related
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1
  • Yes - keep them
  • No - remove them
  • Rework them (but do say how)
  • I don’t care, I don’t mind
0 voters

Following @Devlin 's comment I started thinking about the badges on the forum.

To be honest I don’t care about gamefication much, and up to now I mostly ignore them (only occasionally browsing my own badges out of curiosity).

That said, there are a few benefits coming with the Badges system:

  1. Stealth User Training: Discourse avoids popup tutorials and modal walkthroughs. Instead, it uses badges to teach platform mechanics silently. When someone earns a badge for quoting text, using search, or flagging a post, the badge notification serves as confirmation that they used the platform’s features properly (and yet it can feel pointless, but as reinforced training it does have some merit).
  2. Trust Level Mechanics: Trust Levels 1 through 4 are technically system badges. If we disable the badge system entirely, trust levels still work in the background to govern permissions (like links, uploads, and edit windows), but users will no longer see badge icons or receive promotion notifications.
  3. Automated Group Membership: Badges can run custom SQL queries to auto-assign users to groups. For instance, we can auto-grant a “Coder” group with access to a private category based on post frequency in the development section. Just an example I could think of.

Now, we have three distinct paths on how to proceed:

  • Turn them off completely
    • This eliminates the Badges page, removes the badge section from user profiles, stops badge emails, and purges the UI clutter.
    • Trust level permissions will still run silently in the background.
  • Strip the full and keep it retro
    • Leave enable badges on.
    • Disable badge grant email to stop automated spam.
    • disable all social fluff (First Like, Appreciated, Popular Link, First Share).
    • Replace them with CPC-specific milestones (e.g., Hardware Preserver, Wiki Contributor, Assembly Guru, whatever). But this will be slightly more complicated to set up, honestly.

So, have your say :slight_smile:

I’m leaving this poll open indefinitely to gather as many opinions as possible.

2

I really like this idea as it’s more in keeping with the retro aspect of the forum. A bit like the number of posts rating in the old forum based upon the CPC models. But really appreciate the complexity of this.

I like the trust rating aspect of the new forum. The more you contribute the more functionality you gain and I’d hope that might help you @Gryzor in terms of elements of admin. It also stops some of the spam the old forum sometimes suffered from. At least I hope so!

3

I liked the old batches in a way that demonstrates engagement in the community.

It could be automatically awarded (number of posts, number of responses, number of “thanks” from original author, number of thumbs up). There also should be some more awards from moderators to very helpful users (consider Bryce as he has delivered tremendous value to the community). Something like community awards.

We could even set something up once per year to vote for certain categories and then provide awards to members.

Other than that - currently it is more like “hey you used a smiley” … not sure if that is of a lot of value.

4

The special ‘awards’ are something I had started implementing on the old forum with custom user texts. It’d be nice to have but we’d fall into the whole polling hell - some people would rally to get votes while others (like Bryce) wouldn’t, so I’m not sure about that one…

5

It is just open for discussion - nothing is a must. I am happy with anything. I am also happy with the system as it is.