I’m building communities that bring people closer together. Gamification is one of the obvious elements to implement.
Before switching from Discord to Discourse, I had some custom bots developed, that would serve that exact purpose.
Just to name a few:
GM Bot: Bot that would reply to you every time you say “GM” on the dedicated channel - reply with motivating quote and keep track of your “early bird” streak if you got up before 6am.
Progress Bot: a bot that would track your workouts, meditations, daily journals and successes on monthly basis. This way everyone involved would get motivated to keep the streak on, and would be able to publicly monitor the progress of others.
These are just 2, that were really warmly welcomed and used extensively by my community.
Is there a way to implement such gamification on Discourse?
(I’m not looking for a direct yes/no answer, but more like a brainstorm of what are “low hanging fruits” I could utilize right-away and what could be done over time and budget).
One approach I’ve seen in communities of practice is the use of journal categories. You can implement these by either using the journal plugin or adjusting the category settings to fit your needs.
This is really smart (depending on the context of course, sounds like it worked in your community).
But yes, I think Automation will be your friend for these sorts of things.
And if you find that it doesn’t have the triggers etc. you need available, I would urge you to post in the topic. Who knows if more can be added
Alternatively, Discourse has many available webhooks/APIs, so if you need to go all-out with your automations, you could use something like Zapier or similar no-code tools.
If you need something ready to be used, you could modify Discourse trust levels with your own titles, badges and images to be related to what your community is about. For inspiration, I often go to forum.uipath.com/badges but there are sites that have customized trust levels even further.
What I’m looking for is not necessarily the out-of-the-box solution, but something that will work on the deeper, psychological level to keep users more “addicted” (in a good way!) to the community they participate in.
@loginerror have you came up with these badges? they seem really wonderful!
For badges, I think we use just about all the ways in which you can grant them (the GitHub ones come from the plug-in, we have internal api automations for our Academy, we have some that are done via custom data explorer SQL queries and lastly some that are granted manually).
Unless the question was purely how they look, in which case I can’t take credit for that at all. My artistic skills wouldn’t allow for it
