- Compatible XF 2.x versions
- 2.2
- License
- Use limited to one site per license
- Updates duration
- 12 Months
- Visible branding
- No
Trophy Essentials introduces Cumulative trophies. Xenforo’s trophies are based on the idea of milestones. For example, when you hit the milestone of posting your first 30 messages, you get awarded 5 trophy points.
Though admin can create more milestones, there are always a limited number and if trophy points motivate members, then once you have reached the top milestone, you will no longer be motivated by trophy points.
Cumulative trophies remove the limitation of milestone trophies. Trophies unlimited!
The importance of trophy points
As a side discussion, obviously the importance of trophy points to members varies from one member to the next. While some people value their trophy score highly as a badge of achievement, others couldn’t care less. However, trophy points can be used to advance members up the membership ladder, so they can (and should) have a positive effect of adding member perks.
Cumulative trophies
Trophy Essentials awards points for each positive action a member takes. These are named Cumulative trophies and they can be awarded alongside the Milestone trophy points, though most Milestone trophy awards (e.g. for posting messages and earning positive reactions) become redundant.
Set up
Trophy admin is launched via Users > Trophies where the available trophies are separated into two tabs : Milestone trophies and Cumulative trophies. On first install, there are no cumulative trophies, and they will need to be added from the predefined list.
Note the option, set by default, to position the Cumulative trophies tab first, because it is likely to have more trophies.
Admin add cumulative trophies from a predefined list of cumulative trophy actions. This list contains the actions we feel need rewarding. Note that there are options to add negative trophy points for receiving negative reactions, receiving warnings and having reports rejected. Personally, I would only deduct trophy points when people get warnings.
Adding a cumulative trophy for posting a new thread
The most obvious positive action to award trophy points for, and by which all other trophy awards are measured, is the creation of a thread. This is the core action for growing a forum and so, by default, it will earn the poster 1 trophy point. Admin can set the title and description and number of points awarded for creating each thread. In addition, admin can set the frequency of alerts sent to users for receiving trophy points.
The next important action to grow a forum is replying to threads. So all posts will (again, by default), earn members .1 of a trophy point because we calculated that a new thread is worth 10 replies. Admin can, of course, set their own value for this.
Posting the first reply to a thread is also important to a forum, so there is also a cumulative trophy award for that.
As some trophy point awards can be a fraction of a whole point, when we display trophy points to a member, those actions worth less than a whole point, will have a bar showing the progress towards the next trophy point.
In the above screenshot, the member has posted 638 replies, each worth .1 trophy points and therefore has a total of 63.8 trophy points accumulated.
Note: when we display the cumulative trophy point totals, we only count whole trophy points.
Note: that users do not get trophy points for replying with the best answer to their own thread.
Obviously veteran members who have posted thousands of threads will receive thousands of trophy points, (as opposed to a maximum of a couple of hundred, currently). That's the main reason why this change to the trophy point system is so significant.
Usergroup promotions
Admins will need to think carefully how they use trophy points to promote members up the usergroup ladder because you probably want to avoid having lots of people change user groups (particularly demoted).
Studying the Members page /members/ may help because it shows the number of messages, reactions and current points.
On AVForums a total of roughly 280 people in our top two usergroups (out of a total of over 480,000 members) were demoted and with full explanation of what was happening to the trophies and why, there has been virtually no negative feedback.
For reference, this was the old promotion system:
And this is the new promotion system with cumulative trophies using the default values in the addon.
Redundant milestone trophies
Most existing milestone trophy point awards - those for creating threads and posts, and for receiving positive reactions - will be redundant if points are awarded on a cumulative basis for these actions. So forum admin will likely want to delete those. Doing so instantly recalculates the trophy totals for members.
You may want to keep some milestone trophy awards for actions like adding an avatar or subscribing to a newsletter.
Rebuilding Cumulative trophies
Once the cumulative trophies have been set up, the totals will need to be recalculated for all members.
This can be done using the new Rebuild user cumulative trophies function in /admin.php?tools/rebuild Tools > Rebuild caches. But because it takes quite some time to run, if you have a large forum, it may be wiser to use the command line
php cmd.php xf-rebuild:m2n-trophy-essentials-cumulative-trophies
Be aware that this will trigger the award of trophies to all members and (unless you temporarily turn all notification frequencies to 0) they will all get alerts.
Performance
There are no significant performance issues with Trophy Essentials. It is running fine on AVForums, MGEVs and ORAEVs.
Phrases
The addon is fully phrased. We advise that you change the phrase
x_has_not_been_awarded_any_trophies_yet
From
{name} has not been awarded any trophies yet.
To
{name} has not been awarded any milestone trophy points, yet.
Displaying trophies to users
The two trophy type tabs are shown consistently throughout the forums
The member statistics page will need a tweak to disable the Most points list since the new Most trophy points list will be enabled by default…
…to display the new trophy totals.
Extending trophy actions to support other actions
For information on how to extend Trophy Essentials to support other actions, please see this post:
I use Trophy Essentials on AVForums and I have created all the functionality we need. If you would like additional functionality added, then you will need to fund its development at cost from the coder. Contact me privately to discuss.
Though admin can create more milestones, there are always a limited number and if trophy points motivate members, then once you have reached the top milestone, you will no longer be motivated by trophy points.
Cumulative trophies remove the limitation of milestone trophies. Trophies unlimited!
The importance of trophy points
As a side discussion, obviously the importance of trophy points to members varies from one member to the next. While some people value their trophy score highly as a badge of achievement, others couldn’t care less. However, trophy points can be used to advance members up the membership ladder, so they can (and should) have a positive effect of adding member perks.
Cumulative trophies
Trophy Essentials awards points for each positive action a member takes. These are named Cumulative trophies and they can be awarded alongside the Milestone trophy points, though most Milestone trophy awards (e.g. for posting messages and earning positive reactions) become redundant.
Set up
Trophy admin is launched via Users > Trophies where the available trophies are separated into two tabs : Milestone trophies and Cumulative trophies. On first install, there are no cumulative trophies, and they will need to be added from the predefined list.
Note the option, set by default, to position the Cumulative trophies tab first, because it is likely to have more trophies.
Admin add cumulative trophies from a predefined list of cumulative trophy actions. This list contains the actions we feel need rewarding. Note that there are options to add negative trophy points for receiving negative reactions, receiving warnings and having reports rejected. Personally, I would only deduct trophy points when people get warnings.
Adding a cumulative trophy for posting a new thread
The most obvious positive action to award trophy points for, and by which all other trophy awards are measured, is the creation of a thread. This is the core action for growing a forum and so, by default, it will earn the poster 1 trophy point. Admin can set the title and description and number of points awarded for creating each thread. In addition, admin can set the frequency of alerts sent to users for receiving trophy points.
The next important action to grow a forum is replying to threads. So all posts will (again, by default), earn members .1 of a trophy point because we calculated that a new thread is worth 10 replies. Admin can, of course, set their own value for this.
Posting the first reply to a thread is also important to a forum, so there is also a cumulative trophy award for that.
As some trophy point awards can be a fraction of a whole point, when we display trophy points to a member, those actions worth less than a whole point, will have a bar showing the progress towards the next trophy point.
In the above screenshot, the member has posted 638 replies, each worth .1 trophy points and therefore has a total of 63.8 trophy points accumulated.
Note: when we display the cumulative trophy point totals, we only count whole trophy points.
Note: that users do not get trophy points for replying with the best answer to their own thread.
Obviously veteran members who have posted thousands of threads will receive thousands of trophy points, (as opposed to a maximum of a couple of hundred, currently). That's the main reason why this change to the trophy point system is so significant.
Usergroup promotions
Admins will need to think carefully how they use trophy points to promote members up the usergroup ladder because you probably want to avoid having lots of people change user groups (particularly demoted).
Studying the Members page /members/ may help because it shows the number of messages, reactions and current points.
On AVForums a total of roughly 280 people in our top two usergroups (out of a total of over 480,000 members) were demoted and with full explanation of what was happening to the trophies and why, there has been virtually no negative feedback.
For reference, this was the old promotion system:
| Promotion requirements | Posts | Reactions | Days registered | Trophy points |
| Novice to Standard | 1 | 3 | 1 | |
| to Established Member | 50 | 3 | 1 | |
| to Prominent Member | 50 | 3 | 1 | 75 |
| to Distinguished Member | 50 | 3 | 1 | 150 |
And this is the new promotion system with cumulative trophies using the default values in the addon.
| Promotion requirements | Posts | Reactions | Trophy points |
| Novice to Standard | 3 | ||
| to Established Member | 50 | 3 | |
| to Prominent Member | 50 | 3 | 250 |
| to Distinguished Member | 50 | 3 | 1000 |
| to Outstanding Member | 50 | 3 | 5000 |
Redundant milestone trophies
Most existing milestone trophy point awards - those for creating threads and posts, and for receiving positive reactions - will be redundant if points are awarded on a cumulative basis for these actions. So forum admin will likely want to delete those. Doing so instantly recalculates the trophy totals for members.
You may want to keep some milestone trophy awards for actions like adding an avatar or subscribing to a newsletter.
Rebuilding Cumulative trophies
Once the cumulative trophies have been set up, the totals will need to be recalculated for all members.
This can be done using the new Rebuild user cumulative trophies function in /admin.php?tools/rebuild Tools > Rebuild caches. But because it takes quite some time to run, if you have a large forum, it may be wiser to use the command line
php cmd.php xf-rebuild:m2n-trophy-essentials-cumulative-trophies
Be aware that this will trigger the award of trophies to all members and (unless you temporarily turn all notification frequencies to 0) they will all get alerts.
Performance
There are no significant performance issues with Trophy Essentials. It is running fine on AVForums, MGEVs and ORAEVs.
Phrases
The addon is fully phrased. We advise that you change the phrase
x_has_not_been_awarded_any_trophies_yet
From
{name} has not been awarded any trophies yet.
To
{name} has not been awarded any milestone trophy points, yet.
Displaying trophies to users
The two trophy type tabs are shown consistently throughout the forums
The member statistics page will need a tweak to disable the Most points list since the new Most trophy points list will be enabled by default…
…to display the new trophy totals.
Extending trophy actions to support other actions
For information on how to extend Trophy Essentials to support other actions, please see this post:
Trophy Essentials [M2N Addons]
A new product by m2n is available: Trophy Essentials 1.0.0 - Hugely improve trophies by awarding them for ongoing user activity Trophy Essentials 1.0.0 Description Xenforo’s trophies are based on the idea of milestones. For example, when you hit the milestone of posting your first 30...
www.m2n.co.uk
I use Trophy Essentials on AVForums and I have created all the functionality we need. If you would like additional functionality added, then you will need to fund its development at cost from the coder. Contact me privately to discuss.
