Introducing HigherLogic Vanilla Reactions and Badges

A successful community is an engaging and welcoming place where people can build new connections and discover new things.  Vanilla Badges and Reactions are at the foundation of our member-driven reputation and recommendation engine, which helps you build an engaged and positive community.

Vanilla Reactions allow members to quickly react in different ways to discussions and comments. The Reactions can be used to highlight interesting discussions, suppress abusive comments, flag abusive members, and create more nuanced reputation profiles. Vanilla Badges serve to reward community members for positive participation – members are awarded Badges for receiving praise from others and for various other forms of participation.

Reactions

What can I do with Reactions?

Create a reputation score:  Points are awarded for positive contributions and subtracted for posting off-topic or abusive comments. Reactions have a numeric value: most Reactions will add 1 point or subtract 1 point to the member’s reputation score. Moderators have special Reactions that can add or subtract 5 points.

Award Badges: Users can receive badges for receiving positive Reactions such as ‘Like’, ‘Agree’ or ‘Awesome’.

Promote good comments:  Comments that receive positive Reactions can be highlighted. The threshold for what gets highlighted is configurable. The default threshold is a score of +5 points. (Comments and discussions are awarded points using the value of the Reactions given.)

Bury bad comments: Comments that get negative Reactions can be collapsed and greyed out. The default threshold is -5.

Member-driven curation: A ‘Best of’ page can be added to your forum. It displays posts that have received the most positive reactions.

How do I setup Reactions?

In Add-ons, enable ‘Reactions’. Once this is done, your Dashboard will show a link to Reactions under new section called ‘Reputation’. To enable Reactions, activate the Reactions that you want to display.

Badges

What can I do with Badges?

Award Badges: By enabling the Badges add-on, members will receive Badges that reinforce positive participation in the community. Badges are awarded for uploading a profile photo, receiving positive Reactions, membership anniversary, etc.

Create custom Badges: Custom Badges can be uploaded. Custom Badges can only be awarded by members in a role where the permission has been granted.

How do I setup Badges?

To enable Badges, enable the Badges add-on. This will create a new item in the Dashboard menu in the Reputation section.