Board Thread:New Features/@comment-4151266-20150615172420/@comment-5275700-20150620033659

Thanks Fargo84 for the clear and concise list, and for starting this conversation. I can offer some details about where Wikia is at with regard to the Achievements feature.

It’s clear that it’s popular with users, and it’s clear that users would love to see even more from it. Over the years we’ve received quite a few suggestions about how it might be improved and expanded. While there’s always room to improve any feature, its popularity also makes it clear that right now Achievements is "doing its job" — motivating contributors to keep coming back, and giving newer communities ideas about how to start building out their content.

Achievements was also built quite a while ago, and Wikia’s scale and complexity has grown since that time. It would actually be nearly impossible, from an engineering perspective, to build out the current feature in any meaningful way. Basically, to give users even some of what they’ve been asking for, we would have to start from scratch.

This would be a huge undertaking. In addition to the long list of what users love to see, the whole concept of keeping users engaged with "gamification" has changed quite bit since Achievements was first built. Wikia sees lots of opportunity there, to be sure. However, right now our focus is on other parts of the site. Taking another pass at gamification will make more sense after some of this other work is completed. So because Achievements is doing its job well enough right now, we’re not planning any work on either the existing feature or a replacement during 2015.

Does this mean we won’t fix any bugs that crop up? Never say never, but I’ll be honest, it’s pretty unlikely that we will. Does this mean you should stop sending in feature requests? Not at all! We always want to know what you want to see on Wikia, and what you think will best motivate users to remain active. Hopefully reading this message might even prompt the community to send in even more ideas, knowing that you’re free to rethink the idea of Achievements from the ground up. What similar types of reward systems keep you coming back to games, forums, fan sites and and other places on the internet? What really gets you hooked?