Any system like this needs to be well planned with any number of 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.
It’s clear that any kind of feature that allows members of a forum to reward each other financially needs careful design and protections from fraud. It’s almost essential for Discourse to help manage the financial back end and fraud prevention, so I would expect some percentage of each financial transaction to go to Discourse, some percentage to the forum itself, and the rest to the intended target of the contribution.
The most important fraud use case to consider is that a gang of hackers can show up, create 100 fake accounts, and start sending tokens / contributions to each other. They use stolen credit cards and their hope is to cash out in 30 days, when the reports of a stolen credit card might not start coming in for 60 to 120 days. One way to deal with that might be to have “trust levels” and by default users can only cash out after 180 days, which should catch 95%+ of the fraudulent credit card use.
Ah but with the design of discourse. I would have to disagree with the onus that “Discourse to help manage the back end”. At least as far as Core is concerned.
This comes more on the ones who want to implement this idea. Be it evaluating existing plugins to see if it meets all the requirements or sponsoring a new plugin that carefully covers all bases believed to be required after careful research of legalities.
Discourse by design gives clear options to be able to accomplish just about anything through a combination of Plugins and Then Components into if existing core features)settings.
This is why @Ed_S mentioned that at this junction while discussion is great. It is now more down to a combination of Feature request or in this care more a Marketplace for a new or modified(forked) Plugin if one is serious about having this
That seems like a kind of extreme worst-case scenario, but is good to be prepared for the worst. I agree with Dan, if you really want to get this developed you may need to write the code yourself if you are a coder or start a Marketplace topic if you can pay someone else to do this.