The problem with all these hypothetically “magically awarded editorially because magic” badges is that they create work for people, most notably the editors who are profoundly overworked as it is.
I don’t think giving harried editors a new, abstract, I-can’t-even-explain-how-to-determine-who-gets-it thing … to arbitrarily award users on a regular ongoing basis … is exactly a realistic course of action here.
Now in the context of a contest, sure.
Also @patrace a troll badge is generally a very bad idea, for the obvious reasons.
I think post v1 we will get to category specific badges, N likes on topics the “games” category and N likes on posts in the “games” category that could be used to fill the same need here which is cool.
I know arbitrary badges create more work but I think you’d see a better result. It would be fun and personal.
If editors don’t have time to care about such things, they could always delegate to community members. I think that’s how the throwback BBS hierarchy worked, a promote-from-within thing where people were giving tiny privileges over time as a way to reward contributions and help manage tasks.
I trust that whatever you guys implement will be excellent, just kicking ideas around.
Keep in mind, the “create random badge, give it a font awesome glyph and assign it to someone” is already 100% built, if the powers that be wanted to start assigning them they could.
I was thinking less stick, more fitbit. As in, it would provide me anonymous, non-threatening feedback as to whether I have been keeping with the spirit of the prime goal.
Then I’m not sure what you’re looking for here Sam. Your ideas for badges seem to fall on the awarded individually side of the scale (and if such badges can already be awarded, but aren’t, then there seems little point to brainstorming more) and Jeff seems to want badges that can be automatically given out.
Badges for “likes received” and such don’t seem like really great carrots, and more complex badges like “Created a topic that’s been read for 10,000 cumulative minutes” feel more like milestones than ways to push towards a behavior.
I am just brainstorming, not looking for any specific result. There is a new weapon in the arsenal, wanted to make people aware of it.
Also, I think recognition badges can work in the BBS context sometimes, its a balancing act and really not my call, this would be up to @beschizza and the powers that be.
I definitely think that people who contribute a story to BB should get at least a badge for recognition, maybe even a bronze every time a story is accepted. For one it would allow users to easily navigate the stories user X or Y contributed. There are plenty of useful usages for the new system.
Basically, I’m up for experimenting. Do what feels right, test the generic stuff as well as BBS-specific concepts; adopt adapt improvise.
One thing that would make recognition badges easier to deal with, from our editorial side, would be making it possible for us to slurp a discourse OP back into wordpress, so it happens magically.
Say, editors have a little button that fires up a new wordpress post pre-populated with the originating discourse thread ID in the relevant custom field, and the OP text and author in a blockquote? Or maybe even promote the OP to a wordpress “contributor” and put them as the default author.