Discussion: Composite and Ranked (or Leveled) badges.
I'm trying to figure out how levels are going to work for us
12:04 Brian J Brennan 12:04 Yeah, but they are vague and barely formed.
12:04 John Britton there are two types I can think of one is like points you did it (a bunch of times) the other is like completion you're 1/5 of the way there
12:05 Brian J Brennan So the completion is what we were thinking of.
12:05 John Britton and the final one is the goal
12:05 Brian J Brennan "pie" or "trivial pursuit" badges.
12:05 John Britton ok so I would like to know more when you get into that stuff would be nice to support both or at least give a way to accommodate the other
12:05 Brian J Brennan Yeah. How would the points one change the image, or would it? I feel like points could probably be supported at the evidence URL.
12:06 John Britton so teh pie first you can have 6 slices each one it's own badge for a given topic if you get all in that topic you get the pie they don't (and IMHO shouldn't) have to look like a pie the pie links out to all the pieces somehow is that right?
12:08 Brian J Brennan Yes. The graphic treatment will be up to the end user, but somehow, some way, we'll include a method for specifying the changing state.
12:08 John Britton the question is do I award the pie or do i award the pieces individually and then the pie because we may not define the pie up front
12:09 Brian J Brennan You define the individual pieces, or possible individual pieces, and when the user has earned them all, they get the pie automatically. I don't think you even have to award the pie.
12:09 John Britton we could define 10 badges and then in 6 months say if you get 5 of them you get the half way badge or something
12:10 Brian J Brennan Yeah, that's a good point. Pies could be defined afterwards. Awarding people the crust and letting them fill it in with stuff they already have. Assuming that the crust supports it (via criteria URLs?)
12:10 John Britton something like that but I don't think I want to define my pie upfront and I don't want to issue a "partial pie" each step along the way I want to issue full blown badges that may be pretty independent from each other
12:11 Brian J Brennan And then say that those 5 badges also means you have this badge.
12:12 John Britton yeah the example I'm thinking of is webmaking 101 each challenge has a skill badge associated with it that stands on it's own when you get them all you get the webmaking 101 badge right now they look like this: http://p2pu.org/en/badges/ like a fucking pie but I thnk they'd be better off representing what you did and then awarding you a completion badge at the end
12:15 Brian J Brennan So you have the composite badge ("webmaking 101") defined up front, the problem is that the badges that add up to the composite are not being conveyed in a meaningful way.
12:16 John Britton exactly and also, if we change the number of badges required for the completion (ie add a new challenge) then the images all break so I think pie images should be discouraged (or at least warn people) alternatively, we could not "issue" individual badges from the pie and show on the pie badge page that you've made progress and then issue it upon completion
12:17 Brian J Brennan That's been our recommendation. Until we implement composite badges.
12:34 John Britton ok, that makes sense the second type "levels" would be something like this for us create a challenge get a badge "challenge creator" (level 0) create a total of 10 challenges challenge creator level 1 create 25 challenges -> level 2 and so on you wouldn't want to display all of the different levels on your profile just the best one because it implies all the easier badges we're designating levels with stars (look at the moz badges at the bottom for examples)
12:59 Brian J Brennan Levels make sense, we haven't thought much yet about how to create an standard for it yet though.