Gamification is a technique for motivating people by rewarding them for certain actions or turning everyday tasks into a 'game'. In Crowdicity, Gamification means that users are given points for the things that they do in a community; users can earn points for posting ideas, commenting on them, voting on them, and for other things such as when people vote for their idea or follow them.

If you would like information on resetting a user's score to zero, please see this help guide.

Users are given points for interacting with the community, and when other people interact with them or their ideas. You can find a full list of things for which users can earn points by clicking on Gamification in the Crowd Management menu.

The points that users earn add up to a total score, which in turn dictates a user's community rank. The more points you earn, the higher your score, the better your community rank. You can see an individual user's community rank by viewing their profile, or you can see the highest-ranked users on the community leaderboard. You can find the leaderboard in two places: on the homepage and on the 'People' page.

On the home page, the top ranked community members are shown under the 'Leaderboard' tab in the People panel (see above image). You can also see the leaderboard if you go to the 'People' page, then click on the leaderboard tab to see the top ranked users. As an administrator, you can change how much of the leaderboard is shown (eg. Top 20 users, top 50 users, etc) in the Community Settings area of Crowd Management.

Scores and ranks don't give users any special privileges, they are designed to be a reward in and of themselves: users want to continue to post ideas and comments, etc. because they enjoy getting points and want to be top of the leaderboard.

Your Crowdicity platform is automatically set up with tried and tested values for each of the actions that can earn users points. If you want to, you can change the score value for any or all of the actions. To change the value associated with a particular action:

You can go back to the default score values that your community started with by clicking on Reset these score values to defaults at the bottom of the Gamification page.

You will be prompted to confirm that you would like to reset the score values before the change takes effect.

If you change any of the gamification score values, Crowdicity will recalculate all users scores. This means that any points previously earned for actions will also be recalculated.

Similarly, if you have changed the score values and then reset them to their defaults, all user scores will be recalculated to reflect the points that users would have earned if you hadn't changed the point values

In User management, you can see which actions a user has been awarded points for and remove these points if needed.

To view the user's points, find their profile in user management and then click Edit next to their name. From here, select the Score option to bring up the user's points history.

To remove a user's score, hover over the link and click the red x that appears.

Once you remove a score it will be greyed out and the user's score will be updated immediately to reflect the changes you make.

Restoring scores
Scores can be restored to a user's profile at any time by clicking Restore this score.

Although we would recommend that you leave the gamification feature switched on to improve user engagement, we understand that some administrators may wish to completely remove all aspects of scoring and gamification.

If you would like to remove all references to user points from your Crowdicity platform, un-tick the box next to ' Show user scores, ranking and leaderboard' and click the Save button at the bottom of the page.

Un-ticking this box will remove reference to points that users earn from: