The Problem:
When we first migrated to Discourse, users immediately started trying to farm badges. We had users spamming likes/etc to get badges, and it was decreasing the quality of forum content. We thought badges weren’t really that important anyway, so we disabled them and all was good.
Every time Discourse adds new badges though, we have to manually disable them in our community. This has happened multiple times (we currently have three active badges that were recently added), and it’s kind of annoying, so I spoke with Jeff Atwood (founder of Discourse and StackExchange) and some of the other Discourse staff. Some valuable information came out of our discussion:
Discussion Takeaways:
Farming may have been a problem because we had 1000 users starting at once
When we migrated, every single one of our members, the active members especially, were invited by Discourse to earn the various badges. Because we had so many people aiming to earn badges at once, this may have made the problem much worse than it normally would have been.
Badges can be a learning tool
We really only have tools to discourage bad behavior (flags/etc), but none to encourage users to learn how to use the forum. For instance, the first thing any user does in a site is trash the new user tutorial – Discourse has a badge to encourage users to follow through with it. There’s also a badge for having your post marked as a solution, which may inform users who otherwise didn’t know that feature existed. Badges are a great way to encourage users to learn how to use the site that currently has no equivalent on the developer forums.
They encourage lurkers to come out of their shells
Lurking is not inherently bad, but we’re wasting away potentially great discussion that users might post but don’t because they’re lurking/don’t even log on – there’s even a joke of the DevForum starterpack where people post to get into the group/beta list and then never log onto the forum again. Badges may help gradually pull these users into contributing, or help motivate them to stay in the community instead of leaving almost as soon as they join.
We can remove the problematic badges
One thing that was suggested to me was that we just remove the badges that were encouraging bad behavior instead of all of them. The idea behind this being we remove the badges that encourage bad behavior, but keep the ones that encourage constructive participation.
Proposed changes to badges:
Remove the following badges, as they encourage farming which negatively impacts others:
- Out of Love, Higher Love, Crazy in Love (used x likes in a day)
- Popular Link, Hot Link, Famous Link (post a link which is clicked x times)
- Scribe (create a topic in #tutorials)
Remove irrelevant badges or change to be relevant:
- Promoter, Campaigner, Champion (invite x users); remove or change to accepted nominations
Potentially add custom badges to further incentivize constructive participation:
- Three tiers for “successful” flags
- Three tiers for bug reports ROBLOX_STAFF like
- Three tiers for feature requests ROBLOX_STAFF like
- Taking inspiration from the Discourse Meta, three tiers for users who make successful pull requests to the ROBLOX Github (e.g. fixing a bug or creating a planned terrain tool that there aren’t enough resources to develop)
The Results:
Ideally re-enabling badges with these changes will increase the quality of our community’s content. We can also tweak the badges further if need be. This will hopefully be a good way to educate users without being too invasive, as currently we might flag their post to be moved/etc and they feel attacked because they never even knew what they were supposed to do because we don’t give them the tools they need to succeed.
