Automating gamification points

Development
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I am thinking about Events that will trigger specific points for those who complete them, and also extending this feature to different tasks, like ‘Share your address’ or ‘Show your pet’.

I know the points can be awarded manually, but I want to automate as much as possible because I’m a solo builder, and we all know what managing a Discourse instance means (plus all other areas in our project).

My main use case is related to this: one would not work alone on a project that requires collaboration and contributions, so these ‘Quests’ are central to relaunching our community with this idea built on the daily interaction of our users.

I’m not planning to give random Gamification points but to build our main motivation system for contributing through them. That would unlock the same paid tiers other users would like to be subscribed to. The points offered on ‘Quests’ are more prominent than simple interaction: not 1 or 2, but 5-10 points, for a rough example.

How can this be handled with the different options and tools we already have on Discourse? Automation, Agents, Queries, Workflows?

The best I can imagine is an agent checking specifics in specific topics (Quest ones) and granting the gamification to those who meet the requirements. This should be supervised by admins, and the workflow could have some manual process regarding their specific needs (checking some of the ‘Quests’ by humans).

Approving the agent decisions, like in a mod review panel, would be great, but it’s not in my actual scope. I’m starting with this, and I think it could be valuable for more Discourse communities as well.

If that is interesting to you, please feel free to discuss it. I’m open to any related ideas and suggestions.

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I think “award cheers[1]” would be an interesting action to add to the Workflows plugin, that would make this pretty straightforward to implement right?

You could then check any post for content and award points that way. We already have a “chat approval” step available in Workflows, so it could go check post → wait for chat approval → award points

  1. what we call points in the gamification plugin… though that’s never really caught on, maybe we should just call them points ↩︎

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maybe you could create something with custom forms or the custom wizard plugin

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Thanks Andrew, I tried it but unfortunately the plugin usually gets out of sync with core changes (I understand the mantainer is working on a lot of projects and is very busy — his contributions are very valuable!)

The point is that, since this is so deeply rooted in my project, I’m looking for something that will remain relevant on an ongoing basis.

:discourse: Workflows on the way!