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)