Achievements, Ranks, and Badges

[Phil]

Both of these gamification features are enabled here, as many of you will likely have experienced by now. Both of these features are designed to encourage our members to provide content for our community. In other words, we're literally rewarding you just for posting. Like Reputation and Reactions, both of these might be tweaked to customize them for our community, but they've been enabled out of the box so that everyone can begin collecting Badges.

Achievements are set up so that on certain conditions/milestones — first post, logging in concurrently for five days, receiving a reaction, etc. — members are awarded points and/or badges. Everyone who has submitted a post here should have received at least one badge so far. Others will come as you continue to be an active community member. That's part of the fun. I don't intend to publicize the exact list of conditions/milestones because this isn't a competition. It's a tiny little dose of dopamine designed to thank you for being a member here.

When you are awarded an achievement, you will see a temporary notification show up at the bottom of the site, and the same notification will be available to you in your Notifications at the top right of the forum.

Ranks are titles and images which are applied to a member upon reaching a set number of points on the site. There are 14 rank levels on the site, each of which is triggered once you've accrued the necessary amount of points to unlock them.

These Ranks are visible within the posts of all members. Example below.

We had a very similar feature on the old board, but it unfortunately could not be migrated over and established to the Rank system here, so everyone has started out as a "Newbie," and will continue to climb the ranks as they participate here.

Alongside Ranks, we also have Badges. Where ranks are based on a number of points, your badges are something based on a criteria, or even something that may be manually added. For example, you may be giving a Badge from someone who has completed their profile, or has made 100 posts. Badges may overlap quite a bit with other aspects of the Achievement system. For example, every first post receives both a badge and an Achievement point (that would help in boosting you Rank).

Badges, like Reputation, are visible by viewing any members' profile:

Given how new these features are, they'll take some getting used to, but we feel confident this will positive influences on the community.

As always, if you have any questions, just ask.

Thanks,
Phil

Thanks,
PK