Announcing Badges for community content and user profiles in Help Center

It's with great excitement that we announce User Badges for your online communities - exclusively available to all Gather Professional customers! A little recognition goes a long way, and now you can reward the valuable people in your community, celebrate active members, and nurture healthy interactions - using badges!

We've put together this video introduction of the feature:

What's in the release?

Badges are awarded to users. Depending on your use-case and community, you might want to use different kinds of badges. There are two built-in types of badges:

• Achievements - Award these badges to your community members when they gain or showcase specific capabilities or when they hit specific milestones, (e.g. skill levels, event attendance, trophies, etc.)
• Titles - Designate titles to specific people so the rest of the community can easily recognize the role they play, (e.g. Moderator, Product Manager, Event Speaker etc.)
  Title badges add credibility and transparency to individuals who generate discussion or provide answers in the community.

You can create more badge categories by using the REST API for the feature. For example, you may want a special style of badge for educational certificates or game trophies.

How do I get started?

To get started with implementing user badges:

1. Make sure your theme supports badges. If you're using the standard Copenhagen theme, you simply need to update it. If you've customized your theme, we've made some additions to the Templating API to add the ability of presenting badges in the theme. There are instructions for adding badges to custom themes here.
2. To define your badges. Go to Settings » User Badges" On this page, add the badges that you want to be available to your users.
3. To enable badges, go to Settings » Gather Settings.
4. To award badges go to the target user's profile in the Help Center. Use the Award badge button on this page to add one or more badges to the user.

When enabled, User badges work like this:

• Administrators have the ability to manage available badges. You can create your own or simply install our examples with the click of a button on the initial administration screen. More information here.

• Agents have the ability to award badges to users. This is done via the user profile pages in the Help Center. More information here.
• End users will notice that their user profiles and the content pages have been decorated with badges, rewarding and informing everyone about the awesome skills, status, and achievements that the users have. If you're awarded a badge, you will also get an email notification to inform you about the update to your own user profile.

Who will get it, and when?

User badges are being made available to all customers with a Gather Professional subscription. The roll-out will be completed by Wednesday September 9th, 2020.