[Barny Cusp] So after playing Team Fortress and a few other Steam games lately I’ve come to love their achievements system (I know places like xBox Live do this sot of thing too but I don’t own an xBox so, apart from the Settlers of Catan ones, I don’t care). To the uninitiated it works like this: Each time you do something cool in one of their games it builds towards a goal (such as healing a certain amount, killing a bunch of people in interesting ways, having lots of friends and so on). Once you reach this goal you gain the achievement, it displays it on-screen so people know how cool you are (or, in the case of early, easily-achieved achievements how much of a noob you are). With their latest patch the medics in TF2 have received a bunch of cool new achievements and, if they ever get around to gaining them, access to new equipment which changes they way they play a bit.

Some of you may be thinking that this system was pioneered by the Scouts a little while ago and they’d be right. Sure, it was nice to learn to tie knots and so on, but it was cooler by far to have a cool patch to sew onto something. Of course it’s possible that the para-military scout organisation intended this as a way of getting you to sign up for more cool medals in the real military but that would be ttally cynical and (slightly) beneath me.

So I got to thinking ‘What other places would this system work in?’ and, once I dragged my mind out of the gutter, I thought of forums. What if forums used a similar system in an attempt to promote good behaviour and punish (or at least advertise) bad behaviour. People who actually contributed to discussion and the free-flow of ideas could show off their credentials and those who chose to be less than helpful could wear their marks of shame like crimials of old. Privileges could be given to the more reliable forum users (better avatars, limited moderation abilities maybe) and those who habilitiually offended could be suspended, banned and have their use of the caps-lock key suspended permanently.

In this vein I started thinking of some of the Achievements that might be doled out. I have listed the first lot I thought up here. They are listed in order of seriousness.

Forum Achievements

“Forum Troll” - Trolling 0/100

“Flaming” - Flaming 0/100

“Just the facts, Ma’am” - Excessive quoting of previous text. 0/50

“The Lurker on the Threshold” - Read threads without ever posting a comment. 0/500

“The font of all knowledge” - Link to sites that are relevant and helpful. 0/100

“Corporate Schill” - Inappropriate link to a commercial site 0/25

“Consumer Whore” - Inappropriate link to online store 0/25

“All this has happened before…” - Point out that this topic already exists and add a link to it.

“…And will happen again.” - Do it again in a different thread but linking to the same original thread.

“You hang up. No, you hang up.” - Have a back in forth with one other poster after everyone else has abandoned the topic.

“Hiatus” - Come back to visit a forum after having been away for at least 3 months.

“What I did on my holidays” - Come back and post within 5 minutes.

“It… lives!” - Ressurect a topic thread that has been dead for at least 3 months.

“The Lazarus Pit” - Ressurect a topic thread that has been dead for at least 6 months.

“Name Dropper” - Link to authorities on a certain topic that you (claim to) have met. 0/25

“Celebrity Stalker” - Link to authorities on a certain topic that you (claim to) have met. 0/50

“Number One Fan” - Have a celebrity (previously linked) post indicating they actually do know you.

“Their, they’re. It’ll be okay” - Excessive mis-use of there/their/they’re. 0/100

The main problem I could see here was the extra moderation needed since many of these are reasonably subjective. But it’s not my place to actually implement these ideas - merely think them up and set them adrift on the internet. And if someone has already thought them up then it’s just like that whole Newton/Leibniz “Calculus” thing from back in the early days of the internet.

The latest comic displays how far we have come and how far there is yet to go.

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