Any system like this needs to be well planned with any number if potential safeguards especially if automated. As the potential for someone to compromise the system integrity/hack.
As Ed points outs out. Though this whole idea needs really a community somewhat established and rolling before it is even viable unless one is going to inject finances and then imho it really wouldn’t be advisable to start it this way
I’m not familiar with what gamification means with discourse, there are the automatic badges then other plugins to make system more “game like” as in creating some kind of competition between members?
I don’t see this feature request as neccesarily the same as that.
The thing about gamification is that it steers users towards maximising some metrics: they will change their posting behaviour according to the rewards.
Anecdote: I recall with G+ I found I changed my posting style when I started to get more than 10 likes on a post (I’m not famous!) - I would feel better when I made posts which got more likes, I would feel worse when I got fewer than 10 likes. I changed my style, posted about different things. I was no longer acting according to my interests, or trying to communicate anything particular, I was trying to make popular posts. And with no reward other than likes.
This will suit some people and some communities, but not me.
Yes, there is an official plugin
That can be a problem, I remember experiencing that with first discourse community site I joined got promoted to TL3 but then demoted to TL2 when wasn’t as active, so lost access to lounge category where I had started topics and other TL3 privileges. To get back to TL3 needed to “read” lot of topics, so opened some topics to skim quickly to meet the neccesary criteria for automatic promotion.
This topic idea seems quite different, am not sure how well that could work with this platform. Is just speculation unless anyone has use case story with idea like this or is done in the future.