The Gamification system in Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) is more than just badges: it's used to promote exceptional content, grant abilities to users, and help automate moderation.
In this article, we'll look at each aspect of Gamification in Vanilla so you can better understand how to leverage it in your community.
Points
Before we dive into the various gamification features in this article, let's first talk about the underlying engagement-reinforcement mechanism of Vanilla's gamification system: points. Users can earn points by:
- answering questions (provided this is enabled in the Q&A addon settings),
- having their answer to a question marked as accepted (provided this is enabled in the Q&A addon settings)
- receiving positive reactions on any type of post they've authored (users do NOT receive points for reacting to other users' content),
- and earning badges.
Reactions
Reactions are one-click responses to discussions and comments. They're an ideal way for your users to be engaged by quickly indicating an emotional ("Awesome," "LOL") or empirical ("Like," "Agree," "Vote Down") response without having to add a comment.
- To learn how to enable, configure, and customize Reactions, see:
Q&A
Q&A tends to be the lifeblood of many support communities; encouraging engagement around Q&A also encourages peer-to-peer support.
By default, users do not receive points for answering questions or having their answers accepted. They do, however, receive points for receiving badges that are associated with answering questions (as long as these badges are enabled).
With that said, you may opt to give points to users for answering questions and/or for having their answers accepted. This is recommended to bolster your gamification strategy and to further encourage engagement.
Learn how to enable points for Q&A
Badges
Badges promote participation in and commitment to your Vanilla community, and serve to recognize and reward accomplishments and community participation. Because of this, they're an important part of its social environment, as they give members extra incentive to be active and engaged members.
Vanilla gives you:
- a ready-to-use set of badges (if you have the Badges addon and its enabled) and
- the ability to create your own custom badges.
There are many categories of Vanilla's out-of-the-box badges:
Social and Profile
Reactions
✔️ TIP: Consider disabling any badges that are associated to reactions that you're not using.
✔️ TIP: If you customize your reactions (e.g., if you change ‘like’ to ‘love’), be sure to also update the corresponding badge.
Answers and Comments
📝 NOTE: By default, the Answer badges will be triggered based on the number of answers posted; however, if you have enabled the option to award points for answering questions, the Answer badges will only be awarded based on the number of Accepted Answers posted.
Learn more
Ranks
Up to this point, we've learned how users can earn points from receiving reactions, answering questions, having their answers accepted, and receiving badges.
- But what's the purpose of all these points? They allow users to earn Ranks.
A Rank grants or removes specific community privileges (called Abilities). They can be manually assigned to a user or earned by fulfilling the Rank's associated Criteria (e.g., accruing a set number of points and contributing a set number of posts).
📝 NOTE: A Rank is not the same as a Role and its associated permissions, which govern content access, moderation abilities, and administrator access. See Roles & Permissions to learn more.
A user can have only one Rank at a time. Typically, the user’s Rank is displayed on their discussions and comments, just after their name. If a user has a Title, it's displayed separately, after their Rank.
Rank Criteria and Abilities
When determining the Criteria, it’s important to understand that it’s an "all or nothing" situation: Users must meet all of Rank's criteria to attain it.
Setting up Ranks
When setting up Ranks, consider the following:
- Has there been a migration where we are migrating points? If so, we may need to consider a "currency conversion" of sorts, if points were significantly more difficult or easier to get in the previous platform.
- Keep it simple; don’t overcomplicate things.
- Make sure you have a base/newbie Rank with no criteria since all users must have at least 1 Rank.
- Unless there is a clear reason to do so, do not give users Role permissions via Ranks -- except in specific cases, they should be getting their permissions via Roles, not Ranks.
- Consider changing the Rank names from the default stars to something appropriate for your community.
Learn more
Leaderboards
The Leaderboard widget is a great way to showcase the top contributors in your Vanilla community. These are the users who have earned the most activity-based points during a selected time period (daily, weekly, and monthly) as well as your all-time point earners.
This widget can be used in a variety of places across your community and is a good tool for "nudging" other users to become more engaged in community activities.
📝 NOTE: The Leaderboard widget is available only if the Badges addon is enabled.
Learn more
Bring it all together
Customizing
You can customize Reaction names, Badge names and explanations, and Rank names and messages to reflect your company’s branding and culture.
Styling
You can use custom icons for Badges, Reactions, and Ranks. Some customizations may require a theming developer to implement.
Strategy
A gamification setup is only as good as your overarching community strategy. Gamification should complement your community strategy and drive your key performance indicators (KPIs).
MVP content
Consider creating and dedicating a special area of your community, complete with exclusive content, for your MVPs to make them feel special.
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
