As a developer on Roblox, I find the current badge system rather challenging to appreciate.
Should Roblox address this issue, it would significantly enhance my experience with the forum, given the current system’s limitations.
Forum Badges, those coveted tokens of recognition, are unfortunately limited in number. There are no badges for “View(s)”, “Post(s) Read”, or “Topic(s) Read”.
In summary, I firmly believe that Roblox should introduce a wider variety of badges for the Developer Forum to enrich user engagement and recognition.
How is a limited number of badges detrimental to your experience?
The badges currently available are all default badges that come with Discourse - the forum software used for the devforum. There are many more badges that have been disabled for very good reasons. You can see a full list here. The disabled badges are ones that don’t work with this forum (e.g. inviting people or editing wikis) or would encourage wrong behavior (e.g. a badge for flagging posts). The badges that were ‘added’ are just default badges really.
There used to be some special obtainable legacy badges that were removed a long time ago which don’t appear on the badge list anymore, such as the ‘top contributor’ and ‘editor’ badges - though users who had them still have them on their profiles. It’s probably for the best because they were part of programs that weren’t sustainable. Plus, the devforum shouldn’t be a place where you go to collect special badges. It just gets in the way of the forum’s purpose, which is for us to help fellow members make better games.
The badges as they are already encourage people to post for the sake of posting without contributing anything worthwhile, adding more badges would only make this situation worse.
On top of that, what would the badges even be? Anything that’s remotely reasonable is already there, anything outside of that is gonna be a waste of time.
There’s no badges for post count alone, so I don’t see where you’re coming from with this. Badges relating to posts require a certain amount of likes, which generally aren’t given (at least at the numbers required for the badges) for people just posting without contributing anything worthwhile. A simple example of this is the fact that on any given thread, all of the posters don’t have 50+ likes given for no reason by other users of the DevForum.
I wanted to avoid causing a heated debate with disgareers.
I’ll just rewrite what I said in a better manner:
As badges exist, we should be able to suggest the addition or removal of badges. I believe the same way for any Roblox feature. We deserve the ability to suggest improvements and sunsetting of Roblox features.
When it comes to the case of badges, I don’t think its logical to ask why we need new ones as you could ask why there was a need for the current ones (why not disable them all entirely?).
Personally, I don’t mind if there were more badges or none. It wouldn’t effect my UX foruming. However, badges are an existing feature, so as I said earlier, it deserves feedback.
The question is, what new badges can be added? I disagree that there should be view badges and read badges as they could be easily exploited.
Views are counted every view. OP’s views are often counted as well. I would only support a view badge if a view was counted once per user.
Read badges could easily be farmed if a user opens multiple forum threads on multiple tabs for a while.
In summary, while I support the notion to add more badges, I disagree with your badge suggestions. Perhaps you can come up with other badge ideas (that also aren’t Discourse default ones disabled on Roblox Developer Forum).
Really? I don’t remember that. I know there was the Sage badge, along with Editor, Top Contributor, etc but those were discontinued when the Editor program ended.
The reader badge does still exist. It’s a bit sad though because the badges are fun to earn all of them and nice to have. No idea what he though behind removing all of them was but hopefully one day we’ll see them return.
I get why the Editor and Sage programs ended (unsustainability) but I also wish the Top Contributor program would come back, that was also pretty fun back when it was a thing.
