Badges vs. Awards

Hi all, Chris, Guests,

I believe Awards can expire from one person if that type of Award is given to a different person? So there's one Award and it changes hands, I believe. Is that correct?

 
If that's true, then I have an idea for v11.

What if Awards could be set as Persistent or Non-Persistent. In other words, if an Award is Persistent, it never goes away. If an Award is Non-Persistent, then the Award is only held by one Member at a time.

An alternate idea would be the introduction of Badges. I *thought* I saw this somewhere in Composr, but I can't find it anywhere. A Badge would be like an Award, but it's Persistent. Once given to a Member, it is theirs forever, and it shows up at the bottom of the Members Profile Page for others to see. In this way, people are encouraged to collect Badges. Badges could also be displayed on the main page with some sort of Badges of the Week block. Or a block that just displays Badges won for the past week. Badges would have an icon associated with them at the time the Badge was created (Admin). Admin could give out the same Badge to as many Members as s/he wants.

Recently I've been thinking of a way to give an Award to people that pass a Test. (I have several Tests on my site, and it feels like they should get some sort of Award for passing the Test.) But there is currently no Award for passing a Test (over and above winning Points). Even if there was, it may not be persistent (it might fade away because, I believe an Award can only be held by one Member at a time.)

Barring this as a built-in feature, I've been trying to think of the best way to implement it using a Catalogue. If I create a Catalogue that contains Badges, it could have an Image field and a Member ID field, among other possible fields. That would associate a Badge with a Member. With that done, a mini-block could be written to pull the last 7 days of Badges from the Catalogue and display both the image of the Badge and the Member's Name that won the Badge. The only thing left to do is tie the winning of a Test to adding an entry into the Badges Catalogue.

I think this is at the top of my list to accomplish next for my site, but before I do it my way, I want to know if anyone has any other suggestions on how to accomplish this.
 

Hey,

I was about to reply to your post directly addressing your question(s) about awards, but I decided to check what the tutorial said first. Honestly, it was a mess, so I've cleaned it up a lot and awards should be a lot easier to understand.

Composr Tutorial: Featuring content - Composr

It's unlikely I'm going to try and squeeze anything extra in v11 at this point. I just added a tonne of social media stuff that was going to be in v12 (as a couple of our clients needed some of it, and social media was long overdue for a big overhaul). I really need to get back to wrapping up my issues that are already planned and get it out now, it's been way too long in development.

There's a tracker issue that covers what you're asking for and a lot more:
0000871: Admin achievements system (gamification) - Composr CMS feature tracker
It is primarily for admin achievements (gamification of the admin experience), but it also goes into having a system for regular members too.
It's a cool issue, but also a lot of work.
I added a line suggesting a block to show all recent achievements, as per your suggestion.

Some of what you want is currently achievable now though. You can set up award types with the content type being "Member". You then can assign it to members when editing their account. There's a trophy icon with a hover effect that will show next to the view tab (so long as you fully refresh the member profile screen). It's not mobile-friendly by default though.
You could improve this stuff with a mini-block, similar to what you suggested yourself, but without needing to use catalogues.

Awards aren't really temporary in the way you understand them. It all stays logged. It's just temporary in the sense that the main_awards block picks out the latest award holder only.
The documentation did not make this clear, and it's one of the things I've fixed up.

Excellent...yes, I see that Awards are actually persistent, now that I think about it, and also that Composr shows the History of an Award. I wish we could just turn social media off and turn the page on 2020, but it's predominant in our lives and there's no sign of it morphing into anything different. Networking, mobileness, and social media connectivity is a big growing networking monster that won't be stopped. Thanks for this amazing CMS.