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

Hello Everyone,

Today I am here to propose some critical changes to the way achievements work so as to improve their usability and general usefulness. Largely, I feel that achievements have been abandoned by the Wikia team for years now, but have still remained a very important part of many communities. To summarize my ideas, I've organized them into two categories "For Admins" and "For Users".

For Admins

• Have the ability to hide users from leaderboard - This means that admins can remove inactive users or users who cheated their way on the board and just show the users who actually try

• Have the ability to add and remove specific achievements - A while ago I had a user complain that they had edited everyday, yet were not given the achievement. I was able to confirm that they had done so, but I was unable to help them. If admins had this ability, they could very easily fix these situations.

• Have the ability to create individual achievements - This relates to the fact that all achievements as of currently can only be created in "Tracks" or according to categories. However, it would be very interesting and far more rewarding to users if admins could set achievements for specific articles or a certain number of edits. This could even be tied in with user titles. For example, on the World War II Wiki, we hand out user titles according to one's "rank" which based on how many edits one has. If Wikia staff created a special interface for admins to create achievements, there could be special options like "Give user title of: [Blank]" once awarded or "Unlock after [Blank # of edits] on [Blank pages]"

For Users

• Have the ability to hand out "admin awards" or perhaps even "user awards" - By this, I mean that admins or users could "hand out" awards for doing other things such as being a good wiki organizer or a friendly mentor. Again, on the WWII Wiki, we experimented with these with userboxes. While rejected, this idea could be translated into achievements. Admins could create achievements using the special interface for these undefined actions and allow users to send out these awards to each other like one might see on Wikipedia. Naturally, this would require moderation so that users could not simply spam achievements. To do this, admins could set these special awards as admin only so only admins could send them out or use the remove achievements function mentioned above to remove spammed achievements.

Thank you for taking the time to read these ideas and I hope that these get implemented. Please post any feedback below.  