Replacing Thanks with Gamification
Hi Everyone,
So there's a plugin I want to add to the forums called Yet Another Gamification Application which will replace the Thankful plugin we currently have. You can see an example on my Vanilla forums profile.
The benefits are we can add more reactions than just Thanks (I want to add an Insightful and Funny reaction as well as Thankful) and there are views to see recent and top reactions.
There are also rankings and badges for members which people can see on your profile along with your reaction scores.
The downside is the previously thanked information will disappear (not deleted just not visible).
What do you think? Are you happy for me to add the plugin?
So there's a plugin I want to add to the forums called Yet Another Gamification Application which will replace the Thankful plugin we currently have. You can see an example on my Vanilla forums profile.
The benefits are we can add more reactions than just Thanks (I want to add an Insightful and Funny reaction as well as Thankful) and there are views to see recent and top reactions.
There are also rankings and badges for members which people can see on your profile along with your reaction scores.
The downside is the previously thanked information will disappear (not deleted just not visible).
What do you think? Are you happy for me to add the plugin?
Thanked by 1damousey
Comments
But I think anything more than that is superfluous. I don't really think people should really be rewarded simply for making more posts, or having an older account, or anything that has traditionally been used for gamifying generic forums. I feel that, at the end of the day, we should be rewarding each other for the content we create rather than the earning of (imo) contrived achievements. In that sense, I'm very much for having a nice profile section that lets you add easy links to your prototypes or released games, or your soundcloud or portfolio, or wip threads, or whatever, because I see those as being things that encourage people to make more and better stuff.
So, in a way, if the badges are awarded for "Congrats! You've released your first commercial game!" or something, that's much better than having made x number of funny posts, but that would probably be its own massive personal achievement anyway, to the point where having some forum badge is relatively meaningless...? And being able to link your commercially released projects in your profile would have the same function, but be much more useful.
On the profile side, the new Vanilla has a built-in profile fields; it's now a matter of figuring out what fields to add. Field types are limited to Textbox, Dropdown, Checkbox, Date
I would prefer it if it said "<3" instead of thanks.
'Cause hearts are rad!
I do not thank!
I <3
I don't think insightful and funny and those are worth encouraging. At least not in a way that the <3 aren't doing at the moment. The "commercial release" badge is fine and well but isn't really something that one even should have to earn via a system. The good profile page would do that superbly.
At MOST something like Boardgamegeek's personalised avatar display, so you can do a little message, maybe a link or two. But nothing big. PLEASE nothing big. Forums with crazy signatures are crazy.