Call for Comment: User Medals & Awards

Which are good, which are crap, what should we add?

Published on August 27, 2007 By Zoomba In Virtual Communities

In our ongoing efforts to improve WinCustomize and make participating and contributing more fun and fulfilling for our skinners, we're looking at changing around how certain systems related to user reward work. The first one is the Medals system.

Currently automatically award Medals to users for hitting any number of milestones here on WinCustomize. We track who's the top skinner across the entire site, who is the best in any particular gallery, how many downloads are achieved etc. This information is mostly displayed on your personal page. It's a lot of data to sift through, and it's something we need to do a better job of presenting and highlighting.

To that end, we're looking for feedback on the current user medal system.

What do you like about the current system?
What do you dislike about the current system?
What are your favorite awards?
What are your least favorite awards?
What awards do you think we should add?
How do you think we could improve presentation and meaning of the awards?

Any feedback you have on this system is more than welcome. We'll be taking it into account when revising things, though we can't promise every suggestion will be implemented. This is the first step in a chain that we hope will lead to greater focus being placed on individual users, as well as a more equitable distribution of recognition.

Comments (Page 3)

RomanDA

on Jan 22, 2008

I would love to know what WC has come up with on this, if anything. Its been forever.
I have Awards that i have no idea what they mean. Anyone?? is this thing on??
LOL

BigDogBigFeet

on Jan 23, 2008

How about a Poof! award. No u see it no you don't.

HG_Eliminator

on Jan 23, 2008

badges? we don't need no stinkin badges...

Philly0381

on Jan 23, 2008

How about a Poof! award. No u see it no you don't.

Naw, I got to many of those when I was in the Military.

BigDogBigFeet

on Jan 23, 2008

Ok, since it's good to provide some meaning feedback once in awhile and my previous comment was meant to use humor to keep this thread alive awhile longer, I thought I'd kick in with some ideas.

First I think the awards should reflect the broad base of membership of this community and how contributions are made. What sort of criteria are relevant for a particular award is key to making awards meaningful. Along this line awards should be based in those areas where real contributions are made. Gallery based awards with a sidebar showing in the gallery who the current award holders are. Classes of gallery awards could be categorized as Ratings Leaders, Current Leaders, Veteran Leaders and Community Picks. Broad ranges of categories would work well in large galleries like Wallpapers and Blinds and would help to ensure a meaningful number of authors are represented.

Smaller galleries would only need 2 types of awards say ratings and current. Screen shots need to be recognized. In all cases award criteria should be spelled out and easy to find.

Also, people who contribute to the forums should be recognized with meaningful awards. It's a different type of effort to contribute here and takes some time to learn.

Those are my ideas. You still warching this Zoomba?

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