Who is Trophies?

[AndrewSimm]

I have been at this for 10 years and have yet to enable Trophies on my site.

Who has these enabled and have had luck?

If so, what trophies does your site offer?

 

[sbj]

Same here, just disabled them.

I think trophies and any other kind of "level system" need to be either full-commited or not available at all. That means I don't believe the current XF core trophy system is a full-commited one, which is why I disabed it. It just adds confusion and clutter.

If it was integrated into the forum eco-system very well, then I believe it can be helpful for community engagement. Just like in games where people try to unlock all kind of trophies, it could be an incentive for users. But only if the forum full-commits to it and makes it prevalent everywhere. Where you can gain something from it (like credit system, badges, rankings, etc.)

 

[AndrewSimm]

Same here, just disabled them.

I think trophies and any other kind of "level system" need to be either full-commited or not available at all. That means I don't believe the current XF core trophy system is a full-commited one, which is why I disabed it. It just adds confusion and clutter.

If it was integrated into the forum eco-system very well, then I believe it can be helpful for community engagement. Just like in games where people try to unlock all kind of trophies, it could be an incentive for users. But only if the forum full-commits to it and makes it prevalent everywhere. Where you can gain something from it (like credit system, badges, rankings, etc.)

It's been about 7 or 8 years since I was a big-time gamer. It sounds like you are saying that it has to be very meaningful, like an unlock in a PC game?

 

[sbj]

It's been about 7 or 8 years since I was a big-time gamer. It sounds like you are saying that it has to be very meaningful, like an unlock in a PC game?

Not sure if "very meaningful" is the correct way of describing it, but yeah. Especially console gamers love to unlock trophies. That kind of stuff are integrated well into games. People love to grind games for unlocking stuff. They get skins and weapons and badges and stuff. That kind of system in the forum environment would be helpful, but the current one is just a simple one and "useless" if I may say so. So, I find deactivating it more helpful than to have it enabled.

I mean who of you ever visited this page for example? Does anyone care? Have you ever had trophies in your mind when you posted sth. here on XF?

Trophies

You can earn trophies by carrying out different actions. This page shows a list of the trophies that are available.

xenforo.com

 

[AndrewSimm]

Not sure if "very meaningful" is the correct way of describing it, but yeah. Especially console gamers love to unlock trophies. That kind of stuff are integrated well into games. People love to grind games for unlocking stuff. They get skins and weapons and badges and stuff. That kind of system in the forum environment would be helpful, but the current one is just a simple one and "useless" if I may say so. So, I find deactivating it more helpful than to have it enabled.

I mean who of you ever visited this page for example? Does anyone care? Have you ever had trophies in your mind when you posted sth. here on XF?

Trophies

You can earn trophies by carrying out different actions. This page shows a list of the trophies that are available.

xenforo.com

Yeah, it isn't very exciting. Something with badges and the ability to show off would be more appealing.

 

[Mendalla]

We kind of left it on by default at the beginning but no one much cared or really knew what it was about so I shut it off.

My writing forums use a badge system that gets displayed prominently on your profile and badges get awarded primarily for writing activity (posting a new story, getting more than 30,000 views on a story, being recognized as a Recommended Read, and so on) though there are some forum-related badges, too. Some people are almost insane in their pursuit of badges there.

So I would say that something like that badge system would be more likely to get some interest and excitement going than the current trophy system. Not to mention you need a theme for the site that lends itself to awarding badges. A generic discussion site doesn't really lend itself to awarding badges that are really unique and integrated with the theme of the site.

 

[AndrewSimm]

We kind of left it on by default at the beginning but no one much cared or really knew what it was about so I shut it off.

My writing forums use a badge system that gets displayed prominently on your profile and badges get awarded primarily for writing activity (posting a new story, getting more than 30,000 views on a story, being recognized as a Recommended Read, and so on) though there are some forum-related badges, too. Some people are almost insane in their pursuit of badges there.

So I would say that something like that badge system would be more likely to get some interest and excitement going than the current trophy system. Not to mention you need a theme for the site that lends itself to awarding badges. A generic discussion site doesn't really lend itself to awarding badges that are really unique and integrated with the theme of the site.

It sounds like you made a good choice. What add-on are you using for badges and do users get anything out of getting badges?

 

[Mouth]

If not using Trophies, is your user title ladder based on posts or likes? Do users care about title ladders, or how many post/likes they get to progress through the ladder?

 

[AndrewSimm]

If not using Trophies, is your user title ladder based on posts or likes? Do users care about title ladders, or how many post/likes they get to progress through the ladder?

My user ladder is based on posts but users are able to change their own titles so it has little value.

 

[Seeker-Smith]

For me the only value is to award new members with the first couple posts.

 

[Mendalla]

It sounds like you made a good choice. What add-on are you using for badges and do users get anything out of getting badges?

To be clear, the writing sites don't use Xenforo and I am a member and mod, not the admin/owner, or else they probably would be using Xenforo.

The software they use is open source and the owner has a programmer on retainer so I am not sure if the badge system was part of the OS code base or if the programmer built it custom. Likely the latter since adding new badges seems to require his involvement.

Generally, you don't get anything other than prestige out of badges, but they do award badges to winners and entrants in writing competitions they host (I have picked up a few that way myself) and the top three generally get some kind of prize as well ($$, a free premium membership, that sort of thing).

 

[AndrewSimm]

To be clear, the writing sites don't use Xenforo and I am a member and mod, not the admin/owner, or else they probably would be using Xenforo.

The software they use is open source and the owner has a programmer on retainer so I am not sure if the badge system was part of the OS code base or if the programmer built it custom. Likely the latter since adding new badges seems to require his involvement.

Generally, you don't get anything other than prestige out of badges, but they do award badges to winners and entrants in writing competitions they host (I have picked up a few that way myself) and the top three generally get some kind of prize as well ($$, a free premium membership, that sort of thing).

Gotcha, I could write a badge add-on fairly easily, but outside of video games, I just haven't found a good example.

The challenge is how do you make them meaningful to the users.

 

[Mendalla]

The challenge is how do you make them meaningful to the users.

Yeah, that's the thing with the writing site. I barely pay attention to the badges since they are really just that, badges. Some of them are a nice acknowledgement of successes I've had (e.g. Famous Story, of which I have three, meaning one of your stories has hit 30,000 views), but there's no reward beyond that acknowledgement. But some people seem to enjoy just collecting the badges and will even write in categories they would never actually read themselves just to try to get a badge of some kind.

 

[Mouth]

The challenge is how do you make them meaningful to the users.

Solution superstar?
xx Positive likes?

Generally something that highlights the member as a valued/meaningful content contributor, thereby weight/respect in what they say.

 

[beerForo]

Who is Trophies?

 

[Wildcat Media]

I was bored one day. Somehow I ended up with 99 trophies on one of my forums. I agree it's not very useful, but at least members get a little acnowlegement for their contributions. I have trophies for anniversaries (up to 25 years--the forum has been active over 18 years now), number of posts, likes, ratio of likes to posts, certain custom fields being filled in (we require filling in one of them in order to participate), a female trophy (since the ratio of men to women is like a zillion to one), one for enabling 2-factor authentication, and trophies for when new features are available (such as a custom title, or access to another forum area, in which case they work more as alerts to let them know they have the new feature).

Maybe overall that's how I see it--a means to alert someone to a milestone. The trophy points themselves don't really matter but we reward them anyways. A way to turn the points into a star rating might be helpful, but to be honest, I used to see star ratings in other forums and they never made any sense since they didn't seem to be consistent with participation.