Badges are live.... beta rollout!
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It's good to see something out in the public forums regarding these, they've been in preliminary talks for a very long time. 
Initial concern:
So I'm not going to argue about the name or look of these, whatever they end up being called. Even 'trophies' could be an option, then users can have their own personal trophy cabinet on their profile. That may give an unhealthy association to 'winning,' however. As for the design, it's apparant that LJ has worked these in well to stay on-brand and I know I couldn't come up with anything better. One option for the future may be to incorporate this into the postbit (certainly for the study help one) - I wonder how many people click on user profiles (probably a fair amount of registered users, but not guests) - so making them more visible could be an option for helpful badges. On the other hand, I'd like to be able to have the option to disable badges from appearing publicly. As you can see, my profile is as stripped down as possible and I'd like to be able to retain that.
Questions/Constructive feedback:
The posting badge - Will Chat still be included in this? I see you're excluding forum games, rather rightly. I'd certainly consider excluding chat too, just as we did with previous rep systems. It's something where people can easily get 500+ posts very quickly for potentially meaningless posts. There's certainly a problem at the moment with Chat becoming a sinkhole for a tremendous amount of posts and it's turned into a problem. Getting badges for posts outside of Chat could help some users find other areas of the site rather than just dump their thread/posts in Chat. Certainly something worth considering.
Achievement - Will there be any recognition once somebody reaches the top level? Again, something well worth thinking about rather than a snap decision but if a particular user rises to the top for the study help badge, it'd certainly be worth rewarding them in some way other than a badge. I'm not quite sure what - vouchers could become expensive for TSR if a lot of people reach that for example!
Quality control - If there's a troll thread in study help and someone replies first with a witty comment, getting them 50+ reps (and therefore badge 1) and then the thread is correctly removed, will the 50+ reps for that irrelvant/not actually helpful post no longer count towards the badge? In theory, it ought to behave that way but I realise that could be difficult to do. However, if it's something that's not sorted, it could give people just reason to see it is an unfair system. Even if this quality control isn't automatic at first, will there be any admin/mod involvement in the first month or so of this being rolled out to ensure people are being appropriately badged up?
Lastly - I'm sure you guys will, but please please monitor this and act based on feedback/assessments of the feature in the first few months. There will be problems with this, let's face it, but that doesn't mean it can't work at all. It'll look really good if after a few days/weeks/months identified problems are dealt with efficiently rather than this system rolled out and never touched again. We've got a decent feature here - it's going to be really great for some members whilst plenty will be apathetic about receiving such badges (admittedly, myself included) - so let's not ruin it before it gets going.
Initial concern:
So I'm not going to argue about the name or look of these, whatever they end up being called. Even 'trophies' could be an option, then users can have their own personal trophy cabinet on their profile. That may give an unhealthy association to 'winning,' however. As for the design, it's apparant that LJ has worked these in well to stay on-brand and I know I couldn't come up with anything better. One option for the future may be to incorporate this into the postbit (certainly for the study help one) - I wonder how many people click on user profiles (probably a fair amount of registered users, but not guests) - so making them more visible could be an option for helpful badges. On the other hand, I'd like to be able to have the option to disable badges from appearing publicly. As you can see, my profile is as stripped down as possible and I'd like to be able to retain that.
Questions/Constructive feedback:
The posting badge - Will Chat still be included in this? I see you're excluding forum games, rather rightly. I'd certainly consider excluding chat too, just as we did with previous rep systems. It's something where people can easily get 500+ posts very quickly for potentially meaningless posts. There's certainly a problem at the moment with Chat becoming a sinkhole for a tremendous amount of posts and it's turned into a problem. Getting badges for posts outside of Chat could help some users find other areas of the site rather than just dump their thread/posts in Chat. Certainly something worth considering.
Achievement - Will there be any recognition once somebody reaches the top level? Again, something well worth thinking about rather than a snap decision but if a particular user rises to the top for the study help badge, it'd certainly be worth rewarding them in some way other than a badge. I'm not quite sure what - vouchers could become expensive for TSR if a lot of people reach that for example!
Quality control - If there's a troll thread in study help and someone replies first with a witty comment, getting them 50+ reps (and therefore badge 1) and then the thread is correctly removed, will the 50+ reps for that irrelvant/not actually helpful post no longer count towards the badge? In theory, it ought to behave that way but I realise that could be difficult to do. However, if it's something that's not sorted, it could give people just reason to see it is an unfair system. Even if this quality control isn't automatic at first, will there be any admin/mod involvement in the first month or so of this being rolled out to ensure people are being appropriately badged up?
Lastly - I'm sure you guys will, but please please monitor this and act based on feedback/assessments of the feature in the first few months. There will be problems with this, let's face it, but that doesn't mean it can't work at all. It'll look really good if after a few days/weeks/months identified problems are dealt with efficiently rather than this system rolled out and never touched again. We've got a decent feature here - it's going to be really great for some members whilst plenty will be apathetic about receiving such badges (admittedly, myself included) - so let's not ruin it before it gets going.
I'd like a Troll Badge on my profile plz
(Good work, shows particular posters strengths and overall standing in the community and why)
(Good work, shows particular posters strengths and overall standing in the community and why)
Can we just have neg rep back... please? 
What I like in Facepunch is that if you're helpful, you will gain Useful and Informative ratings. So, like rep gems, a certain amount of ratings will give the user the badge/shield.
Concerning trolls, maybe a Dumb rating should be introduced. On the one hand, it does deter people from behaving stupidly but on the other hand, it can be harsher than neg rep. I really think TSR should have quality control. The more I think about it, the more Facepunch seems appealing. The LMAO pics thread is actually funny. No two threads are the same. No AMAs. People get banned if they constantly put up troll feminist threads in a matter of hours.
Concerning trolls, maybe a Dumb rating should be introduced. On the one hand, it does deter people from behaving stupidly but on the other hand, it can be harsher than neg rep. I really think TSR should have quality control. The more I think about it, the more Facepunch seems appealing. The LMAO pics thread is actually funny. No two threads are the same. No AMAs. People get banned if they constantly put up troll feminist threads in a matter of hours.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for this feedback
I'm on hols at the moment but back tomorrow so will be in touch then.
If you think of anything else please post it
SR
Thanks for this feedback
I'm on hols at the moment but back tomorrow so will be in touch then.
If you think of anything else please post it
SR
'Chatterbox' sounds slightly mean to me. I think you meant 'enthusiastic' and 'has a lot to say'. 
Is 'clever clogs' playing in to the usual anti-intellectual stereotypes that frequent British education, a kind of hint at nerdy swot and therefore not all that nice to know?
Is 'clever clogs' playing in to the usual anti-intellectual stereotypes that frequent British education, a kind of hint at nerdy swot and therefore not all that nice to know?
Original post by Fullofsurprises
'Chatterbox' sounds slightly mean to me. I think you meant 'enthusiastic' and 'has a lot to say'.
Is 'clever clogs' playing in to the usual anti-intellectual stereotypes that frequent British education, a kind of hint at nerdy swot and therefore not all that nice to know?
Is 'clever clogs' playing in to the usual anti-intellectual stereotypes that frequent British education, a kind of hint at nerdy swot and therefore not all that nice to know?
You're a glass half-empty type, aren't you?
Posted from TSR Mobile
Original post by Hype en Ecosse
I'm more like 'we have a glass, now let's try and put something in it.'
I'm a little sensitive on these points as I hate it that smartness or academic-ness is deprecated in the UK.
Original post by Fullofsurprises
'Chatterbox' sounds slightly mean to me. I think you meant 'enthusiastic' and 'has a lot to say'.
Is 'clever clogs' playing in to the usual anti-intellectual stereotypes that frequent British education, a kind of hint at nerdy swot and therefore not all that nice to know?
Is 'clever clogs' playing in to the usual anti-intellectual stereotypes that frequent British education, a kind of hint at nerdy swot and therefore not all that nice to know?
I felt incredibly bad about getting 100% in a science test in year 9 because of this. Stupid swat culture. *shakes fist*
You know, why not have the best of both? I'd propose the following ratings:
Agree
Disagree
Dumb
Funny
Winner
Zing
Friendly
Thought Provoking
Study Help:Helpful
Unhelpful
Most are from Facepunch, with a few which could be unique to TSR. The Study Help ratings would be exclusive to the Study Help forum, and would contribute to the badges. The other ratings wouldn't have an effect on the poster's reputation, solving the problem of attacking the post, not the person.
Agree
Disagree
Dumb
Funny
Winner
Zing
Friendly
Thought Provoking
Study Help:Helpful
Unhelpful
Most are from Facepunch, with a few which could be unique to TSR. The Study Help ratings would be exclusive to the Study Help forum, and would contribute to the badges. The other ratings wouldn't have an effect on the poster's reputation, solving the problem of attacking the post, not the person.
champagne supernova
x
Poster information in a thread?
Members will have a badge icon and the number they hold beside the icon. The colour of the badge and the number of them will be blue for a member but will be light blue for a section leader, purple for a mod, red for community team.
These could then replace "usertitles" in the future, unless the community disagree with this entirely. So study helpers, welcome squad, wiki team, uni assistants can all have their own badge. It would make sense for example for study helpers/ admissions advisers/ uni assistants to all have a yellow badge on their user profile - demonstrated they are a helpful member/ renowned for giving excellent advice in an education focused forum. They're badges on their posting profile will then be "yellow". Thoughts?
Since I posted last we have started creating member role badges:
The posting badge - Will Chat still be included in this?
We have included it at the moment - but I take on your points and given the recent discussion about Chat I think to not include it could be sensible. I will speak to Dez to see if this is possible.
Achievement - Will there be any recognition once somebody reaches the top level? Again, something well worth thinking about rather than a snap decision but if a particular user rises to the top for the study help badge, it'd certainly be worth rewarding them in some way other than a badge. I'm not quite sure what - vouchers could become expensive for TSR if a lot of people reach that for example!
This isn't front of mind now but definitely something to consider in the future
Quality control - If there's a troll thread in study help and someone replies first with a witty comment, getting them 50+ reps (and therefore badge 1) and then the thread is correctly removed, will the 50+ reps for that irrelvant/not actually helpful post no longer count towards the badge? In theory, it ought to behave that way but I realise that could be difficult to do. However, if it's something that's not sorted, it could give people just reason to see it is an unfair system. Even if this quality control isn't automatic at first, will there be any admin/mod involvement in the first month or so of this being rolled out to ensure people are being appropriately badged up?
We're not removing the report function - if members think that in the future that this system is being abused then it needs to be reported.
I don't feel that automatically people would "join up" in an effort to try and trick the system - but you never know. So yes this is certainly something that we'll be keeping an eye on and we'll need the community's help too. Also the way that we have organised it is that the rep generally has to be given by the OP so even if lots of members repped that post it wouldn't contribute towards anything than their overall rep count for now.
Lastly - I'm sure you guys will, but please please monitor this and act based on feedback/assessments of the feature in the first few months.
Absolutely - I'm actually out of the office now until a week Wednesday but wanted to follow up on as many suggestions and ideas as possible before I started my leave. If you have any other info post it - Jack and the team will keep an eye on it.
Original post by Roving Fish
Why make TSR an achievement based forum board?
At the end of the day TSR is a network for students to come and converse, I'm not so sure that people need to be recognised in this way for helping out?
It's another way of saying thank you and making the members that give excellent advice recognisable.
It was interesting to see that you'd be looking to see appropriate people to join Team TSR through this. It's not like you can't already see this at the moment as I was asked to become one out of the blue just from my helpful posts in my uni forum, and then it went on from there. I wouldn't like to introduce a wanna-be-mod (WBM) culture where users make it their aim to become a mod or CA through getting as many posts as they can.
I agree - but it's worth pointing out that this is a way of members of the community sharing with us who they'd like to see as part of the team. I agree that members who do, time after time, give out excellent advice and support are noticed but this is another way of members making their suggestion collectively. I can't see how this can't be a positive
Food for thought, anyway.
Thanks a lot for your feedback
At the end of the day TSR is a network for students to come and converse, I'm not so sure that people need to be recognised in this way for helping out?
It's another way of saying thank you and making the members that give excellent advice recognisable.
It was interesting to see that you'd be looking to see appropriate people to join Team TSR through this. It's not like you can't already see this at the moment as I was asked to become one out of the blue just from my helpful posts in my uni forum, and then it went on from there. I wouldn't like to introduce a wanna-be-mod (WBM) culture where users make it their aim to become a mod or CA through getting as many posts as they can.
I agree - but it's worth pointing out that this is a way of members of the community sharing with us who they'd like to see as part of the team. I agree that members who do, time after time, give out excellent advice and support are noticed but this is another way of members making their suggestion collectively. I can't see how this can't be a positive
Food for thought, anyway.
Thanks a lot for your feedback
Original post by PQ
The problem in the uni/ucas forums is that it isn't obvious immediately that advice is unhelpful.
Eg on results day if someone replies to a thread about getting into clearing with "call ucas" the user concerned will likely spend 30min+ on hold and a bunch in phone bills before finding out that ucas can't help. They may well rep the person offering that advice before they realise.
The unanswered thread competition resulted in a lot of "help" advising users to ring ucas when in fact there are only a handful of situations that ucas are able to help.
Eg on results day if someone replies to a thread about getting into clearing with "call ucas" the user concerned will likely spend 30min+ on hold and a bunch in phone bills before finding out that ucas can't help. They may well rep the person offering that advice before they realise.
The unanswered thread competition resulted in a lot of "help" advising users to ring ucas when in fact there are only a handful of situations that ucas are able to help.
I agree - but there is nothing to stop that happening with the current pos rep situation at the moment. Of course now if they are the first poster to reply to the OP and are repped that this would count towards a "badge" in study help/ unanswered threads. But I wonder how often that would actually happen. Dez has done some research reviewing activity in November
43 people got a single repped reply to an unanswered thread for lv1. Another 6 got three or more (including She-Ra [6] and Puddles the Monkey [4]), and one user, Kittiara, got a rather amazing 16 repped replies – far and away beating everyone else.
Quite interesting feedback given the number of members involved in the unanswered thread initiative. I think it's important to consider that the beta version is a trial so if what we have suggested works then we go back to the drawing board.
In the meantime we need to do more to make sure that member's who are well-known for their advice are more clearly identifiable on the forums. We have struggled with the PS Advice / helpers usertitles which has been frustrating - thinking about the future would you prefer a usertitle or badge?
Original post by Chlorophile
Yes. It's not very hard to work out who the credible sources are if you hang around a certain forum for a while but it would help people who don't spend their entire lives on TSR quickly identify responses worth listening to. I think the two competitions that ran on TSR over the past month really proved that you can't reliably use numbers to quantify helpfulness. They can give a good indication, definitely, but there are too many flaws.
That's why we should continue to work on a criteria over the coming months that helps us to do this/ also look at how these members can be more readily identifiable if we are agreed that is the right thing to do.
Original post by Baby Milo
I suggest removing the current reputation system and adding badges at the bottom of each post. If someone gets 5 x Most Helpful from 10 members then they get 1 x Most Helpful badge added onto their profile. Five or more people found it helpful so they've had that added onto their profile as recognition. If someone gets 10 x Uninformative or 10 x WUM then the mods look into that and if they think that's a fair assessment they then add 1 x Uninformative to that users profile. If a user has more negative type of badges then their name is red. If a user has more positive type of badges then their name is green.
Makes it very easy to identify those who are posting crap on the forum and also the added layer of the mods having control (could even have mods dedicated to badges etc.) means even if the negative badges are spammed people won't be incorrectly labelled on their profile as the mod will have the final say.
Makes it very easy to identify those who are posting crap on the forum and also the added layer of the mods having control (could even have mods dedicated to badges etc.) means even if the negative badges are spammed people won't be incorrectly labelled on their profile as the mod will have the final say.
This has definitely been noted - thank you Baby Milo.
Original post by Snufkin
I am not sure that separating the study help forum from universities is a good idea either, it seems to me that a helpful poster would do the same thing in both. In my experience, new users do not often rep people who have their questions answered so it seems unfair to only count posts which have been repped. You say the culture of rep giving will change over time, but I think that is unlikely.
Oh that was a bit of a negative post, woops.
I am not sure that separating the study help forum from universities is a good idea either, it seems to me that a helpful poster would do the same thing in both. In my experience, new users do not often rep people who have their questions answered so it seems unfair to only count posts which have been repped. You say the culture of rep giving will change over time, but I think that is unlikely.
Oh that was a bit of a negative post, woops.
We recognise that we need to have a uni advice badge up and running as soon as possible. The mod team fed this back to me almost immeditely.
I think sharing admissions advice is very different to helping someone with their maths equation so for now I don't think it would be appropriate to club these two areas together.
How do you think we could change the culture of rep?
She-Ra
x
Hey, thanks for going through the trouble of reading/replying to that during your time off.
Always happy to talk about developments with you/the team too (without needing to clog up threads ).Original post by Champagne Supernova
Hey, thanks for going through the trouble of reading/replying to that during your time off. Always happy to talk about developments with you/the team too (without needing to clog up threads ).
Always happy to talk about developments with you/the team too (without needing to clog up threads ).Thank you
Massively appreciate that.Original post by She-Ra
Thank you Massively appreciate that.
Massively appreciate that.My honest opinion is that not enough people care about TSR enough for this to benefit anyone.
Posted from TSR Mobile
Original post by She-Ra
I like this idea too Saying why people have chosen to rep could be helpful and ensure some members don't try to make a game of the system.
Saying why people have chosen to rep could be helpful and ensure some members don't try to make a game of the system. Yeah, those who are helpful should get different recognition than someone who's funny. Also, everyone should see who rated whom, and not only subscribers. There used to be this whole "Oh, I'm going to sub so I see who negged me." on TSR, while on Facepunch, you can see who rated who and via what rating.
I do miss a balanced rep system, and that includes disagreeing with someone or finding an academic post unhelpful. On Facepunch, there's no such thing as reputation, only post ratings.
Original post by Maid Marian
SHIELDS. Please call them shields. Can we have swords and bows and arrows and crossbows and axes and staffs too? 
Only subs can hide their rep.
Only subs can hide their rep.
TSRunescape
Badges have gone live today - accessible via your profile:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=1300197
For more information check out the what are TSR badges page which is currently being updated.
There's been some changes to the criteria for hero and clever clogs.
Remember that this is the beta rollout and more development will happen based on your feedback and suggestions.
Cheers everyone!
SR.
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=1300197
For more information check out the what are TSR badges page which is currently being updated.
There's been some changes to the criteria for hero and clever clogs.
Remember that this is the beta rollout and more development will happen based on your feedback and suggestions.
Cheers everyone!
SR.
Original post by She-Ra
Badges have gone live today - accessible via your profile:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=1300197
For more information check out the what are TSR badges page which is currently being updated.
There's been some changes to the criteria for hero and clever clogs.
Remember that this is the beta rollout and more development will happen based on your feedback and suggestions.
Cheers everyone!
SR.
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=1300197
For more information check out the what are TSR badges page which is currently being updated.
There's been some changes to the criteria for hero and clever clogs.
Remember that this is the beta rollout and more development will happen based on your feedback and suggestions.
Cheers everyone!
SR.
Loving this already since I've just been awarded Chatterbox Level 3 already
- I'm assuming it takes into account what you've already done this month? If it doesn't I want to keep my badge lol 
I am a bit baffled by the badges. I received a "Clever Clogs" level 1 badge which is apparently awarded to those who offer support within the Study Help forums. I don't think I have made a post in that section for years Not sure how that works 
Not sure how that works Quick Reply
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