Well, basically I’m just playing around with my Heroes theme here. So this is like the non-themable version that has assets I can’t re-distribute, experimental styles, additional theme components, and a lot of adjusted site settings and texts…
But I’d like to share some gamification ideas, for the sake of documenting them and with the hope to get some further inspiration and feedback. These are ideas that I find generally valuable.
General view
The setup drops the default “More” dropdown, re-names categories as Realms and adds a custom section Journey that picks up some of the links that are by default bundled under “More”: Badges as Achievements, Users as Fellowship and Groups as Paths.
Badges / Achievements
I added a distinct look for the Basic trust level and aligned it with all “First time”-type badges. This clearly sets these badges apart as plain onboarding steps. I’d love to be able to move all bronze and silver badges out of the “Getting Started” section, but it seems I can’t do this on the admin backend.
I think having a distinct starter badge could be generally helpful in Discourse, because it clearly marks an onboarding stage and raises the value of the Bronze badges as actual community-related achievements.
Groups / Paths
I added a lot of Gamification based on groups, re-framing them as Paths members can take. Each path provides a distinct ability that a member can assume as a role. Group membership is re-framed as Unlocking a path and can either be assigned manually (for staff groups like admins or moderators) or achieved by being granted a badge (as enabled by User Group Membership Management Through Badges).
Admins / Guardians
Guardians are essentially Admins that have full access to all backend features, including banning or silencing members.
Moderators / Keepers
Keepers are Moderators, but could also be Group Moderators. The role is focused on curating rather than policing. It’s a distinction I generally like about the group moderator role.
Lovers
This group can be unlocked by a badge like “Gives Back” or “Empathetic”. I set up the special group ability so only lovers can use emoji reactions:
Regular users can only give likes. This could be build upon further by only counting reactions as cheers and thus making Lovers the exclusive curators of a leaderboard. I’d be curious to see how this could play out in practice.
Mythmakers
The Mythmaker group can be unlocked by badges that reward great content and dedication. For unlocking a group it could also be nice to require several badges, rather than only one.
Their special ability is elevating the content of other members. I set this up by giving exclusive access to tags to this group:
This could also be further build upon by a component that features topics based on these tags, so this group would be the curators of featured content.
Scribes
Scribes are the Experts group. Their posts are distinguished with a highlighted background:
Simliar to other implementations of Experts, they could also be group moderators in a knowledge category.
Implementation
One implementation challenge I’d be curious to solve is how I could restrict special abilities to a member’s primary group. So even though members could unlock several paths, they’d need to pick one at a time.
This works for example with my implementation of the Lovers ability, as reactions are just made available with CSS, limited to a primary-group class. But I wonder if there’s a way how I could limit a group right - like the access to a tag - to that group being the primary group?
