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Frank
Product Guru
December 5, 2017

How To Create A Badge

  • December 5, 2017
  • 36 replies
  • 1804 views

Everyone likes their contributions to be recognised. Creating a stylish set of badges is a great way to reward individual members, and to show off your community's flair.

Badges come in two flavours: Automatic & Manual. Automatic badges are handed out to community members when they reach certain levels of activity in the community. Manual badges can be handed out the community team or via API.


To start with, we’ll go through the steps to create a single badge to reward members who answer a question in a ‘Teleportation’ category.
 

How To Create An Automatic Badge (based on community activity)

  1. Sign into Control as an Administrator or Community Manager.
  2. Go to Control → Gamification → BadgesAdd Badge
  3. Add a fun Title and Description.
  4. Set the badge type to ‘Automatic badge’.
  5. Add a high-quality Image to use as your badge icon.
    • Badges should preferably fit in a square canvas (same height and width).
    • We use one image for showing a badge throughout the platform.
    • Badges should still be recognizable when they are displayed small.
    • The smallest default size is 20x20 px.
    • On profile pages, badges are shown bigger. By default, this is 45x45 px.

     

  6. Define the Rules for a community member to receive the badge (in our example, minimum amount of answers = 1).
  7. (Optional) Choose the categories (community/knowledge base) or modules (ideation/product updates) within which you want to limit the rules of the badge under ‘Where this applies’ (in our case, we want to limit it to the ‘Teleportation’ subcategory).
  8. Hit Save Changes, and you’re done.

How To Create A Manual Badge (awarded via Control or API)

  1. Sign into Control as an Administrator or Community Manager.
  2. Go to Control → Gamification → BadgesAdd Badge
  3. Add a fun Title and Description.
  4. Set the badge type to ‘Manual badge’.
  5. Add a high-quality Image to use as your badge icon.
  6. Hit Save Changes, and you’re done.

See this tutorial for information on how to award a manual badge in Control: 

https://community.insided.com/badges-109/setting-up-rewarding-and-revoking-manual-badges-1873

 

See our API documentation for more information on how to award a manual badge via API.

Notes:

  • Set up an automatic badge with the wrong rules and need to revoke it from some users? Or accidentally awarded a manual badge to the wrong user? No problem. Go to the user’s profile in Control and revoke the badge from them.

  • Content from categories that have the ‘exclude from gamification’ option set to true is not included when awarding badges.

  • ​​​You can make automatic badges ‘inactive’ by setting them to manual (e.g. you could create ‘limited-edition’ automatic badges for specific campaigns or holidays - just make the badge manual when the event is over).

  • ​​​​​​You can use GIFs for your badge icons. G. I. F.s. Your badges can be animated! We also support .png, .jpg, and .jpeg images.

  • Topics/replies marked as spam or trashed are not taken into account when calculating badges. However, if a user achieves the criteria for a badge before the topics/replies are removed as spam or trashed, the badge will not be removed from them automatically.

    36 replies

    Jurgen
    Helper ⭐️
    December 6, 2017
    Cool! Is the .SVG fileformat supported? This format would scale nicely.
    Frank
    FrankAuthor
    Product Guru
    December 6, 2017
    Cool! Is the .SVG fileformat supported? This format would scale nicely.

    @Jurgen Thanks for your question. Unfortunately we don't current support .SVG files for badge icons. I've updated the How To with more information about the file formats we do currently support. 😌
    😌
    Jurgen
    Helper ⭐️
    December 6, 2017
    What a bummer! Seeing as the Simyo Community does use the SVG-format for their badges, for example. SVG's are lightweight and, again, scale perfectly.

    No idea why you're plugging the GIF option really, GIFS as badges would just bog down your forum because of their large size, I think.

    Thanks for updating the How To.
    Frank
    FrankAuthor
    Product Guru
    December 6, 2017
    Thanks for your feedback @Jurgen. SVGs would be cool - I'll make sure your feedback gets to the Product team.

    Regarding GIFs - if you're performance-conscious, perhaps you could have a single, special animated badge, rather than animate all of them. Then your members would really want to get that badge.

    😌
    Tiou
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    March 2, 2018
    Hi @Frank,

    How do you configurate a birthday badge (e.g. to celebrate someone who has been a member for 1 year)

    Thanks,
    Tiou
    forum.voo.be
    Frank
    FrankAuthor
    Product Guru
    March 5, 2018
    Hi @Tiou - thanks for your question 😀,

    I moved your post since it relates more to adding badges with certain rules, rather than notifications.

    You can't currently configure a 'birthday badge' 🎂 with the self-service badges tool (i.e., a badge based on the age of a member's account on the community).

    In the future, we'd like to expand the rules for badges, and having this one available would make sense.
    😌
    Tiou
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    March 6, 2018
    @Frank OK, thanks for the info.
    forum.voo.be
    Anne
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️
    May 30, 2018
    Hi! I see Simyo, Consumentenbond and Eneco all use .svg badges. Does this mean this format is supported now for all users of the new template?
    User is king
    Shane1
    Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    May 30, 2018
    You have a good eye 😉 but no not yet. These badges were all added before self-service badges, when our implementation team used to create badges manually.
    Suzanne_Kindertelefoon
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️
    August 15, 2018
    Is it possible to make a badge for someone who's active in all subcategories?
    I want to make an 'explorer' badge, for users who are active in every categorie.

    I selected al our categories, and i choose minimum amount of comments: 2,

    does that mean:
    2 comments in each of those categories?
    or
    2 comments in the total of all those categories?