A status ve been changed & badges

Hello,

I will do my best to provide further clarification regarding the badges, notifications and points awarded in our community.

To begin with, members can self-manage enabled notifications via their profile. Simply go to Account & Privacy Settings → Notification Preferences and choose to be notified by notification popup or email, or both, for the headings displayed there. As you may have noticed, the forum offers quite granular options for setting preferences for notifications.

When it comes to posting in the community, there are a range of post types to ensure the forum includes the type of content suitable for its needs. The options that display are dependent on which addons are enabled in our community, and we have the following post types:

• Discussion
  
• Ideas
  
• Polls
  
• Questions
  
• Events

Now, I will focus on the Ideation posts, since this is the topic of interest here. Ideation is designed around the singular principle of soliciting and gathering ideas and feedback from our users, all from a centralized location: the unique Product features and Ideation category. There are of course benefits for this approach, as members can submit their ideas in the category we have defined for this purpose
and admins can keep users in the loop about their submissions via default and/or custom status labels.

A status can be assigned to each idea to inform users what state the idea is in, and whether the idea is open to voting or not. By default, Ideation includes the following default statuses:

• Active
• Already Offered
• Declined
• Completed
• In Progress
• In Review

We can change an idea’s status, depending on the case, and when doing so, we may optionally provide an explanation for the change (e.g., if changing from In Progress to Complete, we can let users know when they can expect the new feature to be available). Of course, such updates are dependent on many factors and we cannot guarantee to close the loop on all submissions, but this is the desired outcome. Changing an idea’s status will trigger notifications to the idea author and any idea voters, if these notifications are enabled for their accounts.

Users can also vote and comment on submissions to help crowd-source the best ideas. By default, all ideas can be upvoted. When a user clicks to upvote an idea, +1 is added to its Ideation score. Users submitting ideas will receive +1 point for each upvote their idea receives. Perhaps this is something worth adding in our Guidelines for Product features & Ideation. [later edit: added].

@Gjoksi thanks for changing the discussion type to Ideation, I have now also moved the thread in the Ideation category, as it remained in the Windows category where it was initially posted. 😉

So yes, you would have received a default notification due to these changes and according to the notifications preferences you've set, despite the fact that there were no actual updates or comments on the ideation thread, like you noticed.

In regard to badges, as per the above post quoted by Gjoksi, we have dozens of out-of-the-box badges. These are pre-configured and designed for different purposes, such as commenting, membership anniversaries, and to show approval. Some badges are dependent on the Reactions and Q&A addons being enabled, and each badge features a label that clearly indicates the purpose of the badge. Points are also awarded when you earn a badge and members can earn points by:

• answering questions (provided this is enabled in the Q&A addon settings),
• having their answer to a question marked as accepted (provided this is enabled in the Q&A addon settings)
• receiving positive reactions on any type of post they've authored,
  and earning badges.

This is a classic gamification process part of the forum culture and maybe we can expand more on this topic by creating a dedicated post. I will take this into consideration for the future and I take this opportunity to thank you for your feedback. Apart from the 1st and 2nd Level ranks, there are no other differences for the subsequent ranks (3, 4 and 5), in terms of available options and settings and / or posting restrictions.
The setup concerning the 1st and 2nd ranking levels is used to limit the ability of spammers to take advantage of our community and protect users from abuse. To do this, we limit the abilities of our newest users until they have a proven track record of trustworthiness. For this reason, only verified members or those who are promoted (automatically or manually) to the 2nd rank level are allowed to post active urls and screenshots and there's a notification informing of this whenever new registered members in their first rank try to post such content.

Regards,

Alex