Badges and User Reputations

Badges and user reputation are an important way to encourage the usage of a forum through game mechanics. Gamification is not new to social media, but seems to be one of the key areas required in any Enterprise-wide forum product. Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. The real benefit of gamification is about understanding how users behave, what motivates them, and using techniques that reward them for doing things that ultimately help an organization achieve their aims. Users see their scores and badges change as they use the forum, and as their colleague’s score and status change users are encouraged to stay involved.

Social Squared awards points for creating new posts, having posts marked as an answer to a question, and receiving votes. The default badges are little medals. The more reputation points a user has the more medals are displayed.

A users reputation score is the sum of all the different awarded points. Using the reputation score, a badge is display depending on which achievement level the score falls into. Badges are a way for to provide special recognition to a user who has a particular impact in the forums. By default, User Reputation is enabled, with new posts awarded 1 point; when a post is voted up, 5 points; and for posts marked as answers, 10 points, and four achievement levels are configured by default, as shown in the table below. You can modify these achievement levels, reduce or increase the number of levels, and provide your own images.

You use the Forum Settings page to configure the number of achievement levels and images to be used for the badges. These settings are configured at the Social Squared database level, that is, users scores are acculumated across all forums that are part of forum groups that are stored in the same Social Squared database.

To configure User Reputation Scores, use the following steps:

!You need to be a Social Squared administrator to complete these steps.

1. Click Settings , and then click Site Settings.
   
   
2. On the Site Settings page, under Social Squared Forum, click Forum Settings.
   
   
3. On the Forum Settings page, scroll down to the User Reputation Scores section, and configure accordingly.
   
   
   
   When posts are displayed or on the user profile page, Social Squared checks the user’s reputation score, finds the appropriate badge, using the values typed in the Min Point and Max Point columns, and render badge image, detailed in the Image Url column displaying the tooltip from the Title column, when the cursor hovers over the image.