In the thread “Badges, Badges, oh my!” within the Community Building category, stephtara explores the design of a badge system for their community. They express concern that platform-feature gamification might be overwhelming, preferring instead to award badges for community-specific achievements like tech support, expertise in topics (e.g., food, ketones), and completion of beginner steps. NateDhaliwal suggests using groups and user titles as alternatives, noting that many of these scenarios require manual awarding due to the difficulty of detecting them via SQL. stephtara confirms that manual attribution is acceptable given their active staff and asks if groups can be managed by non-moderators and if titles effectively display group membership. NateDhaliwal clarifies that badges can be automated using SQL queries and that group membership is visible on user profiles. stephtara inquires if group membership can trigger badge awards, which NateDhaliwal confirms is likely possible, recommending ask.discourse.com for specific SQL help. Additionally, stephtara requests a feature to bulk edit or deactivate badges to improve efficiency. Finally, stephtara asks if badge attribution is limited to public categories, which could render badges ineffective for communities relying on private discussions. NateDhaliwal responds that the importance of badges varies and points to a related discussion on badges in private communities for further clarification.
Amongst my various “headaches” in setting up/designing my community is the question of badges. I think that “gamifying” participation in the community, in our case, will not add anything, and the deluge of badges when one joins might even be overwhelming/confusing.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have badges for things related to how our community functions, rather than use of platform features, with some exceptions. Here are some ideas that might make sense for us:
badge for somebody whose responses are regularly liked/supported by the OP/staff
badge for somebody we identify as good with tech support
badges for various “specialties" or areas of expertise: food, ketones, emergencies, Senvelgo, high doses, dosing advice, continuous glucose monitors, unit conversions…
badge for somebody who has their emergency kit
badge for somebody who has a tracking spreadsheet set up / has completed their profile / has made a cat file topic for their cat
badges for various “beginner steps”: I’m checking for ketones; I’ve done my first injection; I’m measuring blood glucose; I’m comfortable applying the protocol with this or that insulin
So:
are badges for this kind of thing too?
what would the best way to “clean up badges” be? where should I start, how should I tackle this?
Something I see is that you could also use groups for some of these things. Also, you might want to use titles to make it more clear that these users have that badge.
One thing I noticed is that a lot of these things need manual awarding, as I don’t see a way for SQL queries to detect them, so you’d need a pretty observant staff team.
Thanks for your observation! It confirmed my suspicion that maybe groups are the feature I’m going to have to use. Manual attribution is not a big problem as indeed, we are very involved following our users closely and being familiar with their situations. With groups, I can have non-moderators with the rights to add/remove people from groups, right?
And you’re saying « titles » would make it possible to display the groups a user is in, therefore making them « badge-like »?
Oh, another question: badges are always automatic? Is there a way to « configure » what triggers their attribution? I looked around a bit in the interface but didn’t seem to see anything for that.
Oh, that’s pretty cool! I can deal with a little SQL if I dust it off. I’m guessing group membership could also be queried? So if the user is in group ABC they could get the ABC badge? (To take a very simplistic example)
An extra question on this topic: is there a way to “bulk edit/deactivate” badges?
With the current interface, I need to:
click on the badge in the list
select deactivate
scroll down to the bottom of the page
click save
scroll back up to show the top of the list
click on the next badge and repeat
Seems to me this is a group of settings that it would be helpful to be able to “view as table” to make all the modifications in one go. Is there a way to do this?
Ask Discourse tells me that only actions in public categories count towards badge attribution. Is that correct? If it is the case, then it means that for a “public” community where most of the activity is going to happen in private categories (see Public community, private community, or a mix? (context: migrating from Facebook) ) then basically, badges become kind of nonsensical.
Would somebody be so kind as to clarify this for me? Thanks in advance!!