One option for displaying badges next to avatars I haven’t seen mentioned is the ‘reddit gold’ style:
Whichever post earns the badge is the only post where the badge is displayed.
This makes badge-worthy posts a point of pride to the receiver, and a teaching moment for everyone else. It works equally well with custom badges and automatically awarded ones. It avoids persistent badge clutter and calls attention to the behaviour being rewarded.
The badges that are low-hanging fruit, encouraging newcomers to become fluent with Discourse, would collectively form a ‘baby’s first Discourse’ scrapbook.
The harder-to-get automatic badges would serve as a trophy, immortalizing the ‘achievement unlocked’ moment with their post.
The fun custom badges would be displayed in context of the relevant post, illuminating potentially cryptic awards or in-jokes.
Clicking on the badge from the post would take you to that user’s profile, clicking on the badge from the profile would take you to where it was unlocked.
Of course, badges that can’t be associated with posts don’t fit well with this concept:
I’d argue that those sorts of badges are geared towards instructing new users or are personal achievements that we don’t want to advertise alongside posts for other reasons, like flagging things. They can contentedly live on the user’s profile.
I particularly like the idea of seeing posts get ‘killstreak’ style awards for continuous days visiting the forum.
I was thinking of a similar approach. When you think about “decorated officers”, it might say that on their title in the office but they are not wearing the medal of honour in their daily work. They’d only wear them at official things, conferences or dinners with the president. Moving the analogy over to discourse, the “daily work” would be hunting questions in the forum, help and discuss. The official part though is harder to pin point because a) almost all of the work is very public and b) that can highly depend on the context and the “medal”.
As said before on a python-question, that you are a “javascript expert” is of no interest and vice-versa. But you could easily have both of these badges. But especially since discourse really emphasis on one-topic-per-topic, it is very likely that the most important medal for a topic wouldn’t change within the topic.
So I was thinking. What if, when someone has a few title-unlocking-badges, they select one as the main badge, but with their first answer, they can also pick another title to be used within this specific topic? It still be one badge (or title) shown next to their profile, making it clean and clear, but gives the flexibility for a decorated officer (so, someone, who has extensive experience with the form anyways) to make the choice which “medal to wear for this topic”.
I don’t see a use case. Looking at the suggested badge list there isn’t a single badge where this would make sense in my opinion. Even with manually awarded badges there doesn’t have to be a single post that was responsible for the user to receive it.
Keep in mind I don’t think we should only support badges that can be associated with posts. But I don’t think we want to clutter the core Discourse UX with what is merely a way of gamifing positive behaviour. If a badge can’t be correlated with a post — the heart of a forum — why should it distract from them?
I think this proposal complements badges counts nicely. Incorporating badge counts would serve as a constant reminder of your score, bringing out your competitive nature, without inviting vanity. And their true purpose – encouraging good behaviour — would be more memorable when presented sparsely, rather than becoming a sea of clichéd bumper stickers you ignore at every light.
By keeping the post-related badges in the post UI, and the trophy case in the profile UI; we keep the focus on the game, not the prizes.
Interesting notion. I would counter by saying badges on posts is clutter–an additional form of distraction. In addition, now I’ll have to look in two (or two hundred) places in order to tally up all of my badges, instead of just the trophy case on my user profile. That seems pretty hostile.
I don’t know where you take the idea of a sea of clichéd bumper stickers from. In the latest posts we were talking about one single badge that can be shown under the avatar, similar to how the title works now.
As I said, I fail to see a use-case for topic-specific badges. Do you have any concrete examples?
EDIT: Sorry, missed your posts with examples. I don’t think any of these make sense. It’s completely irrelevant in what specific topic a user used the quotation feature for the first time. Similarly the other examples seem also pointless. Where’s the value in that?
I think the proposal @christhekeele stated makes more sense for later silver and gold style badges. We also reserved the area under the post for annotations in addition to likes, for things like “this post reached 500 incoming links from buzzfeed.com” … that is even on the discourse.org homepage.
Sorry, I was villainizing the average forum, not what we’ve been discussing! I quite like the idea of displaying single favorite badges.
User profiles should definitely sport complete trophy cases. I’m trying to refine our motivations for displaying them, as a devil’s advocate, just in the context of posts. So our take on badges as clutter is in accord – but aggregating them in profiles still makes sense.
I like my idea, but as we discuss it I’m more and more convinced my approach is too minimal. This seems an excellent compromise, highlighting the exceptional badges rather than obscuring most of them.
Hey! I just realized that the super-awesome quiz app, Quiz Up! (Android & iOS) does something very similar with titles and it works quite well! Basically if you become adept in a certain quiz category, you unlock related titles. Then you can change which of your unlocked titles displays under your name to other players.
This is what a lot of mmorpgs have. You gain titles from doing different things ingame and you can pick which title to display over your head along with the character name
Hey guys, been following the progress on this through github and am just wondering whether there is an exact outline of the tasks involved in bringing this feature to live? From what I can tell at this moment it basically only exists as a series of ideas, am I mistaken?
We already have titles, was going to leave it at that for a while. Once we have a large number of badges we can revisit, just got in trust level badges on Friday and the badges UI is looking a bit better these days.
You have three badges but there is no way of knowing that because your title is a link to a group. How can both needs be met under the current circumstances?
Hello,
I am very happy to see this badge project, because I’m looking for a forum for my dating advice for men community.
I love the Discourse ajax newsfeed and category system ; it is revolutionary.
But Vanilla offers automatically and manually awarded customizable badges.
Badges are a BIG deal for me, to reward and encourage user investment through gamification.
What is the timeline for the badges project to roll-out, in a V1 version?
I fear that if it’s too far off, I may have to go with Vanilla… which I don’t want to do, as I LOVE the Discourse newsfeed + categories!
Thank you.
PS: I think it is VERY important to not just relegate all the badges out of sight in the user profile trophy cabinet, but to have some sort of indicator next to the user avatar image on the feed. I would say only display one trophy to avoid clutter, and allow the user to choose which trophy (his favorite, hardest earned one) he display on the feed. Seems like a good compromise between clutter and overt social validation.
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