We’re trying to encourage users to help each other. We’ve decided to start awarding a custom ‘Users Helping Users’ badge (u-h-u) to users who are the first to respond and whose response attempts to help.
Because we want lots of this behavior, I’ve made the badge something you can get more than once.
Since it take human intelligence (currently) to assess whether a user’s response was an attempt to be helpful or just a “me too”, this badge is awarded manually.
Adding humans necessarily introduces a point of failure and I’ve realized that it would be very easy to award the u-h-u badge to the same user/post over and over. Nothing stops you. For badges that can only be awarded once, they disappear from the badge-award dropdown, but this one doesn’t.
So, for multiple reasons (including re-inforcement to other users), I think it would be good to have something like this:
Oh I didn’t write a reply to mean that you should have searched first, but to show support for the feature request, as it’s something I remembered being asked many times before.
And the new Related Topics acting on your new topic is way better than a simple search, and can find topics that a search couldn’t
So I guess a plugin could search badges for topics and add them to the serializer? That seems potentially expensive, though I haven’t looked at what the query would be like.
I’ve closed the other two in favour of this one and pointed them here.
One thing Sam suggested in the other topic was to add a staff notice to the post which earned the manual badge as a way to emphasise it and mark it as already having earned one:
My use case here is that I create “Book Club” topics and everyone who reads the book and then discusses it should receive a “Book Club” badge. The badge can be awarded multiple times, as we have a different book each month.
It can’t really be automatic or bulk-granted by the API since anyone who posts “I don’t want to read this book” would technically be part of the topic and I don’t want to give them the badge.
What I’ve been doing is reading the thread and any time someone says they have finished and writes their review I manually give them the badge. This is a fine workaround, if a bit time consuming.
The trouble is, after a month I forget who I’ve granted it to and who I haven’t, and have to keep clicking into their profiles to see if it has been granted. This gets complicated as people can earn them multiple times.
To cut a long story short, if someone is awarded a badge for a post, would it be possible to show the badge next to that post? All the data is there to do this, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult? And this would really help keep track!
PS. On a related note, there seems to be a bug that means the “Reason” is not actually set. I definitely granted this directly on the post, but Reason does not show:
)
