The discussion revolves around gamifying a Discourse instance, specifically a support forum, to encourage users to interact with each other. Tiffany_Long wants to award badges to users who post on multiple topics where they are not the OP, but lacks the capability to monitor such engagement. pfaffman suggests using the data explorer plugin, which Tiffany_Long doesn’t have access to.
4ong offers alternative solutions, including using the discourse-data-explorer, discourse-ratings plugin, and rewards plugin, to implement gamification concepts such as journaling, automatic “checkers,” and rewards between groups. 4ong also mentions using Fluent Discourse and Anvil for automation. Meanwhile, HAWK questions Tiffany_Long about the long-term goals of encouraging connections among support community members.
With custom automatic badging out of our reach, how are you gamifying your Discourse instance?
Our forum tends to be used as a support forum, and what I really want it to encourage people to talk to each other. At first I was looking into some badging that allows us to give badges when a user has posted on 3, 10, 20, 50, and 100 topics where they are not the OP. But that is not a power available to me because I cannot even monitor that type of engagement with Discourse.
I imagine that getting a few people (like 10?) who actually do talk to each other a bunch of times daily, throughout the day, to model that behavior would be more productive than badges, but I don’t know about your community.
modeling the behavior is something we are working on, but it depends entirely on folks seeing the behavior in a support oriented forum with lots of single threaded conversations.
The badge allows people who do the behavior to see that we appreciate it and thereby be encouraged to do more.
We don’t have access to the data explorer plugin. But if we get it, will have to figure out how to account for posts where the op is not the poster. That seems like a step two problem though. XD