I never payed to much attention to Badges that you can earn as a forum member, but after receiving a few, I can say that I like the ideea and they give you some satisfaction when you read the description of some, and see that you are among a few others that received it.
I don’t know if you can see all of them that are available to receive, even from the start as a member, or after getting more privileges, but now I can see them all, and I have some sugestions:
all unreceived badges should stay hidden, just to not encourage an unnatural behavior from members, just to earn them. Badges should be won as a merit of the natural, unforced behavior of members on the forum, without a perspective of reward if they do that or that.
there are some badges that encourage abusing some options in the forum just to get them, like Out of Love, Higher Love, Crazy in Love, Popular Link, Hot Link, Famous Link.
there are some badges that whatever you do, can’t get them after a certain point, like New User… and Shawn Squad. Maybe some members would feel left out, I don’t know. Myself, I consider them ok and they should stay.
If these all are hidden for new members, than I encourage everyone not to give details about them.
If somehow this is considered spoiler, than you can delete the topic. No ofense taken.
Funny anecdote. I tend to not pay attention to these either, all those achievements and gamification of everything is going out of hand, but when on one other forum I got this badge:
Please show examples of users who have done this to the community’s detriment.
I agree that the ones for likes could be silly, but again, can you demonstrate that this is a problem?
I did manage to get “Out of Love” over on https://meta.discourse.org/ once. It was Really Hard. I think it would be even harder here, as there are many fewer posts. But again, do you have evidence of a problem?
It is hard for me to imagine how a user submitting a popular link could cause a problem.
I am not sure that it’s possible to disable badges one-by-one without a plugin. It is possible to add new ones that are awarded when certain criteria are met. It’s not so easy to find out about since discourse.org removed it from their standard hosting packages.
No evidence so far, because they are not awarded yet . I just sugested this as a posibility. I was thinking they shoud represent a real envolvement, not a fabricated one, and alowing this posibility, you can never be sure. But, I realy don’t care too much. If ones goal is to spend his time earning badges, go for it. If everybody is OK with it, no problem.
I realy didn’t know that this badge system is a third party one, and you can find it on other forums. Anyway, I agree that we are a prety mature comunity and members here are great, very very different from other forums like game ones etc. So abuses may never happen. I didn’t found a topic about this, and since today I had more free time… how better can your spend you free time than on Storj forum.
And I am guilty too… the one badge made me read the Community guidelines and discover were they where. And I’ll try to go for 365 day visitor myself.
I don’t see it as a problem because even if someone were to game the system to achieve a badge, there is no swag or other prizes associated with achieving a badge.
Badge assignment is unlimited among the user population so there is no real detriment to other users. Nobody loses a prize opportunity or ability to gain the same badge type.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting it. It could be correct if it’s pull requests on github in general. I was assuming this was about pull requests for the Storj repo.
Yes I would also assume the Forum would count Storj repo only but if its counting your entire github that makes more math sense but not necessarily design sense.
The github_badges_repos site setting was set to storj back in December of 2019. Admins can browser-search the logs . It’s supposed to be a list of repos. The plugin is described here.
. I just sugested this as a posibility. I was thinking they shoud represent a real envolvement, not a fabricated one, and alowing this posibility, you can never be sure. But, I realy don’t care too much. If ones goal is to spend his time earning badges, go for it. If everybody is OK with it, no problem.
