I'm trying to find a way to make my forums more interactive. One idea we brainstormed about in an editor chat was to allow users to earn "badges".

We have let's say 15 channels. So a channel would be Food&Wine. So we'd want to have a Food&Wine badge, that someone could earn by building up 100 points. Then the Food&Wine editors post various challenges in their forums like "Ate something green today". When someone checks that they did it, they earn whatever point value went with it. When they hit 100 points, they earn that badge which shows up in their signature.

I understand I'll undoubtedly have to do some custom programming to get this to work. Does anybody have anything like this implemented already, for me to build from?

We have two trains of thought on this - one that badges become permanent, as a sign they earned a "merit badge" in that topic area. The other is that they are temporary, that you earn a fresh one each month. Or maybe we have bronze-gold-silver ones, and bronze is if you did it once, silver is if you did it this month, and gold is if you did it ten times or more, or something like that.

I can code it from scratch but would rather start with a framework if someone else has done this smile


Lisa Shea, owner, BellaOnline.com
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