I understand all that, but it still seems inappropriate to me on a discussion board.
If ‘gamification’ was the intent of the original designers of this forum software, they did a fairly poor, amateur-ish job at it. It’s hard to be proud of your eighteen gold stars if there’s no board to look at to see how many you have.
“Little Jimmy, you almost have enough stars to go with us on the class trip!”
“OK, great Miss Smith, how many more do I need?”
“I don’t know”
“Well, where do I find out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you can post a note outside the principal’s office!”
“They’ll check for me?”
“Maybe, but it’s not guaranteed. This is a student-helping-student environment.”
So, again, if gamification was the goal, these forum designers need to read the Wikipedia article Sniper posted earlier, because honestly, the poster-board chart in my seventh-grade class was more intelligently designed. Primarily because I could walk up to it and look at it, and track my progress. Miss Smith has those devs beat into the ground on that facet of ‘gamification’.
Apologies for the derail, if it is one. It’s on topic, but only tangentially related to OP’s questions. TL;DR I stand by my original opinion that ‘gamification’ wasn’t really the intent here, but rather to reward people that naturally participate to a certain level, because there’s not any evidence that they wanted people to track their progress or grind it out at all.
/shrug