Hey all! One of the features that drove the team and I to trial Discourse was the element of gamification. One thing that I’ve enjoyed in previous communications platforms (Teamspeak & other forums) has been a public display of badges, whereby, at a glance, you can see people’s roles/achievements/statuses with a slew of icons. Profile flair also does a nice job in this regard. I’ve tried the Post Badges component, and while it certainly does upgrade the core functionality towards what we’re trying to achieve with gamification and overt display of badges, it’s limited in scope since it takes the control largely out of the users’ hands concerning which badges they’d like to display.
I’m posting to tap into the generous minds of those far more experienced than me in using Discourse to discover any ways to display & give users control over the display of badges on posts, near their name or avatar, to maximize the feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction with regard to achievements and milestones. I know of Trust Level Avatar Flair and the previously mentioned Post Badges components, but aside from that, I’m under the impression that we should seek a customized solution through the marketplace if we wanted any more functionality, which is not a problem, but I’d like to rule out any lower-hanging-fruit before moving up the tree, so to speak. Any direction/experience is appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Thank you for your response. I like avatar flairs for very distinguished achievements, quickly identifying team members or for temporary competition victory recognition - i.e. we have one student per month in our educational community earn “Student of the Month,” and I imagine we could temporarily add them to the Student of the Month group with the relative avatar flair, and once the next student is selected for the following month, we could convert it into its more permanent residence in the badge space to the right of the user’s name/title.
With regard to the process in mind, I imagine it something like this:
Team selects/creates badges that can be displayed (we’d like users to earn the more basic badges for gratification via learning but wouldn’t want post badge overload, so we’d opt to disable most of these from display)
User sees badge through badge page or next to another user’s name/title and wants to earn said badge.
User earns the badge(s)
User then has the option to display the badge (assuming it had been selected by the team to have the ability to be displayed in the first place)
(Optional, but cool) User can change the order display of the badges he or she has earned.
Badges appear next to username/title on posts for greatest exposure without detracting from actual post or forum contents. (Alternatively, under the user’s avatar as seen on forums like Envato (linked below)
I’ve also included our current badge display using the Post Badge component (test site during trial hence the fun Runescape icons) This provides many of our desired features. However, as previously mentioned, the user has no say in what badges display, the order in which they are displayed, nor do they have the ability to disable any of the team-approved badges.
Thanks for the extra details. I think this is a cool idea but it is definitely plugin territory as the opportunity for users to customise the badges that display doesn’t currently exist.
