Perhaps this is a pipe dream, but as sub-economies have proven to be a very effective way of hijacking goal-oriented psychology I would love to see a native points system in IPB.

In such an application one could develop different "banks" for different types of points systems depending on the nature of your website.  Examples:

• "credits" (for purchasing services, Store products, exchanging for cash donations to relevant charities)
• tokens (for gambling, buying bling for their online personae)
• hours (if you're like me, you sell hours of tuition and/or consultation)

How might these points be accumulated/awarded?  Examples:

• buying blocks of tokens/credits/hours in the Store
• buying Store products: buy product X and get Y amount of credits in points system Z
• having the highest-rated answers in a Q/A Support forum
• having the highest reputation in a given forum
• Awarding points to people who invite new members to your community
• completing courses or other certifications

Other ideas:

• Targeted emails to certain groups, or certain individuals when credits/tokens/hours are at X or 0 - time to get more!)
• Targeted emails to people indicating they've been awarded free tokens/credits/etc.
• Promotions where points are awarded under special circumstances from dates X to Y
• Toss tokens into a (virtual) fight pit and watch your community fight for them.  Cue the oldschool Star Trek fight music.  Dance, puppets, daaaaance! mwuahahaha)

Hijacking goal-oriented psych--err, offering points could be a great way to spur development and participation in one's community.  They could also obviously be integrated into other apps (or other apps could make use of points) as part of competitions, e.g., submitting the highest-rated photos, articles, blog posts, etc.  The possibilities go on and on!

As some know there have been a couple of third-party devs who have made Points systems, but I have come to think that if one is going to embed something like this into a community (let alone a business) I wouldn't want to trust it to anyone but the core developers for updates and stability.

I obviously can't speak for others, but I for one would be happy to pay for this as an additional (optional) IPS module, similar to the way IP.Downloads is offered.

Edited February 2, 20214 yr by liquidfractal

 

😍

There's so much to unpack here, but I love where your head is at. I put your feedback into our system and will have some eyes take a look. I'd imagine this would be a huge undertaking, but I do think it'd elevate Invision in a pretty profound way. @liquidfractal

I think so too, @Jordan Invision - but I also think it's the kind of thing that would add a new dimension to the Invision suite and allow for all sorts of possibilities - including all the possibilities I can't think of.

Thanks for your response and for sending this forward!

Edited February 3, 20214 yr by liquidfractal

Jackal´s Members Shop does the job quite good. I hope invision to keep pushing in what 3rd party providers cant do, like to improve the mobile app, UI, etc

In the other hand, social media almost destroyed forums and they doesn´t use points. You dont build a community "paying" people for posting

 

Interesting perspetive. 

On my forum, members can earn a subscription (which gives them perks and an ad-free experience) by earning points. Points are earned by commenting and posting topics. I do find that that does incentivizes people. 

Also there's this blogging platform called Medium.com. They are a subscription only platform (you can read a few articles for free each month). Their business model works like this: publishers (people who post stories there) earn money by other subscribers reading their stories. Any time a subscriber reads a story, the publisher of that story gets a cut of the subscribers' monthly payment of $5. In other words, it does pay to post 🙂

Ey Jordan, congrats for your new job : )

Yeah, I know medium, Im a subscriber and I love it!

But:

1.- I think they´re not a community per se
2.- As you said, they pay you if many others subscribers read your stuff. They pay quality, not quantity. No views, no money

Maybe for some communities that works, and I'm ok with that, of course. In general I believe that the fewer mechanisms and functions a community has, the better the user experience.
Many administrators instead of concentrating their energies on creating a community, spend their priceless time adding and configuring a lot of useless stuff thinking the more things the forum has the better. I disagree

 

 

 

Actually, forums have been "paying" people for posting since the beginning of time.  

We pay them in badges, in ranks, in pips, in titles, in signatures, in special permissions, in upgraded membergroups, in crazy formatting and styling.  We've been paying and paying since forums have been around.

So, forums "pays". I agree with you. But SM doesn´t, thats the reality. And I see SM crushing forums, so may be we should learn from them. I´ve never seen people complaining because FB, TW, doesnt give them badges, ranks, titles... and that´s because people doesn´t care about them. They want a clean, modern interface. Filling their screens with medals, badges looks really old and annoying. They dont want to see badges, or how many posts, or likes, has a member every time they read a comment. 
Maybe Im wrong, but that´s my opinion, we all are trying to learn here and be better admins for the good of ours comunities so I like to read yours opinions even if we dont agree.


 

 

 

I would not say "SM crushing forums", I would say "search engines crushing forums". Many people do not really know there are other possibilities than SM or content sites

Really?
I see all the people I meet in forums no using them anymore since many years ago. All of them are now on SM. And you now what? all of them now create better content tha before because they cant hide behind an username, they have to use their real name.
Search engines penalices forums for their low quality content. 
We should drop that elitist way of thinking that "people using SM are retarded, all the good people use forums". That may be conforting but simply no true.
We should learn from them in terms of simplicity, UI design.
Reading some books is a nice way to start: "contagious. Why things catch on" and "hooked: how to build habit-forming products" are masterpieces and can really help to be a better admin
 

 

It is not true for all projects. I have some communities where people are BECAUSE they do not want to use their real names. Think of medical content, psychological and other vulnerable issues that people do not eager to share with the whole world. 

I agree on this. In fact Im working on a new project: a community for investors and entrepreneurs and I wont require real names because these people wants privacy to relax and share experiences, ideas, problems, etc. Less privacy = less content. But I showed invision to some of my partners and they begged me to use only discord. They see forum UI as really old and over complicated. 

There are priorities, as resources are scarse. I´d prefer invision fellas to expend their valuable time trying to improve UI, mobile UX rather than creating something already exists and will demand lot more of bugs fixes and support. My 2 cents : )

 

Edited February 5, 20214 yr by SammyS

 

But before wanting to put together a file to present, and participate in long discussions on these subjects, it would be good for IPS to tell us at least what its future intentions are to avoid wasting our time.

I can tell you with 100% certainty now that the Invision team is putting efforts into gamification in general in a release this year. 🎉 

If IPS is serious about gamification, here are some foundational points:

1. Entire suite -- Not just forums. Not just apps.  But the entirety and power of the full Invision suite: uploading a cover photo, filling out a profile custom field, writing a status update, making a blog post, RSVPing to a calendar event, getting a post marked as best answer, creating an album, renewing a subscription for the sixth time, winning second in the leaderboard, getting an item promoted.     
2. Weighted -- Writing an in-depth long-form blog is very different from uploading one image, but IPS weighs them the same as one content item.  They shouldn't count the same.  
3. Customizable -- I would like a gamification system to be customizable to exclude / include nodes, categories, and apps.  How I reward my users is very different than how you run your community or how Invision runs its community.  How we offer member journeys will be as diverse as our communities.  
4. Clubs -- I would like a gamification system to include clubs.  Not nearly at the same amount of customization, but each club deserves its own basic set.  
5. Meaningful -- The rewards should be: Immediate, Recognize the relative difficulty of the accomplishment, and Provide the steps needed to get to the next reward.  
   • Typical reward: "Congrats, you won a badge for making X posts."
   • Better reward: "Congrats, you won a badge for making X posts, an accomplishment that puts you into the top 10% of users.  Your next badge is at Y posts."
6. Attention Grabbing -- If a tree falls in a forest and no notification is sent out, does anybody care?  Gamification needs to have movement, to have excitement, to be dynamic, and offer a call to action.   

  What I'd like for gamification to address:

• Profile onboarding - I've logged in to the accounts of multiple users over the years, and every single one has totally ignored the Profile Completion.  I would love to actually see usage statistics on larger sites, but at least on my site, most users don't care about Profile Completion.  I'd rather deprecate Profile Completion in favor of Gamification.  
• New user activation - There needs to be multiple calls to action within the first X minutes, where X is the site's average session duration. I've seen first-hand how if I can talk live to a user when he first joins, his posting skyrockets at least over that session. There needs to be activity, excitement, and movement within that first session duration.     
• Member pathways - Users find fulfillment in many ways in our communities. We need to empower them to both progress along certain member pathways while encouraging them to also explore other pathways.