Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1196539-20131221183156

As some of the mods are aware, I recently got into some hairy business with pointsgaming and was banned for one month. Though none of my edits were malicious or spam, it is entirely my own fault for not reading the rules more thoroughly, and I accept full responsibility for this. Now that I am free to post again, however, I would like to make a suggestion and get feedback from the staff and users on this site.

I'm proposing that badges be removed entirely. Their purpose is completely contradictory to that of a Wiki, and in the long run, can only cause more harm than good. I think this logic is self-evident, but will elaborate fully...

The entire purpose of badges/trophies/achievements/what have you is a competitive one. To pursue and acquire them; to rack up points. This is why numbers are attached to them. Competition is fun... but a wiki isn't the place for it. It makes no sense to have a feature like badges--ESPECIALLY ones with points attached to them and a leaderboard of which site members have the most points, for Pete's sake--if the pursuit of said badges is a punishable offense. It's the equivalent of showing a horse a carrot and then beating it with said (presumably very large) carrot. It projects very mixed signals, especially to new users of the site, and has obviously caused enough problems in the past for an entire tab to be devoted to pointsgaming in the site rules... and for what payoff? The headache that a points system causes the site and its staff in the long run far outweighs the novelty.

There are some alternatives, but the bottom line is, I just don't think we need this system. It's harmful to the site. Alternatively, we could acknowledge the competitive nature of the system, and just tweak the definition of pointsgaming to only punish spam or otherwise pointless activities (making multiple small edits that could have been a single edit, pointless blog entries, etc.)--but, I've stated my opinion; badges just aren't something a wiki needs.

Please voice your own thoughts below. 