As a way to acknowledge the outstanding members that make the College Confidential community great, we’d like to introduce a new “badges” feature on College Confidential. Initially, badges will be visible on your Profile page and will help to highlight your participation and contributions. In the future, the feature will allow us to showcase our most active users at the discussion level within the forums where the majority of their engagement occurs.
We’ve created a set of badges that highlight your level of engagement (defined by your number of posts), your helpful contribution (defined by the reactions you receive on your posts), and your dedication to the site (defined by the number of years you spend with us). Each badge gives you a certain number of points, which are added to the ones already displaying on your profile.
The system is now live and takes into account your historical activity, so the badges will be assigned automatically as follows and are visible from your Profile page:
Badges related to your anniversary: awarded the next time you log in
Badges related to your activity: awarded the next time you post
Badges related to the reactions you receive: awarded the next time you receive a like, agree, or helpful
If you have any questions, please post them below!
I have a bunch of badges. They are little icons with no explanation. The only way anyone would know what they mean is to take the time to open each and every one and see the explanations. I did a few, just to see, and I can’t see why this is valuable at all in this current format.
Isn’t it enough to see how many posts I have made, and when I joined? Those are easily read on my profile page.
The rest of this is someone having a good time with the metrics…and honestly, I don’t think it has value at all to anyone else.
This reminds me a bit of the neighbors looking into the glass recycling bin on the curb and marveling at all of the bourbon and whiskey empties I’ve put out there. But it is what it is.
My guess— not labeling the icons is either because this is still a work in progress, or more likely they are clickbait, (especially since you have click to see what the icons are for) and then the marketing people can sell more advertising by showing how many clicks things get.
I agree that it seems redundant since the info is readily available by seeing a person’s join date and # of posts, agrees, likes, “helpful”s, etc. Both are only seen when going to a poster’s homepage. But it (the “badge” thing) may be for the target HS audience, not the parents (even though its the parents with the “buying power”).
So I’ve seen my badges accumulate over the past few days. (I find it interesting, @romanigypsyeyes, that my 2.5k replies badge says that only about 10 times more people have that than have your 25k badge—I’m kind of interested in playing games with that kind of data sometime.)
My question: Is there going to be a place to see what all the possible badges are going to be? I mean, if this is a move toward gamifying the forum (which I’m totally not against), it’s always good to know what achievements are possible in advance.
I think badges are kind of fun, honestly—but I think the CC badges could use some better designs. For starters, only differentiating different levels of the same type by a really, really tiny number? (And a number that has nothing to do with the number underlying the level, at that!) Kind of weird.
