Denied [Website & Forums Suggestion] Limiting Number of Medals on Posts to Reduce Spam

In-Game Name:

LegendaryTrio​

What part of EcoCityCraft is this suggestion for?

Website & Forums​

Short title for your suggestion:

Limiting Number of Medals Shown on Forum Posts to Reduce Spam​

What are you suggesting?

Allows users to pick and choose a limited number (10 - can be customized) of forum medals that they have acquired and wish to display beneath their profile picture on forum posts in order to reduce the amount of visible "spam" on the server's website​

Why is this a good addition for EcoCityCraft?

I have changed the scope of this suggestion to better reflect the divisions that exists between two schools of thought as @FuriuosGeorge and @Mission001 have pointed out in the discussion below. By reducing the number of forum medals a user is allowed to display beneath their profile picture, players would be able to emphasize the medals most important to them and with which they want others to see, while at the same time culling "spam" on forum threads. This does not mean the removal of any forum medals already established in the past. Nor does it prohibit medals from being added in the future. As "spam" has been the most important issue over the course of this debate, medals do not need to be removed from ECC just for the sake of reducing "spam".​

Other information:

The Xenforo Medal System Plugin FAQ page lists the following questions and exceedingly pertinent answers to our collective situation.

Q: Can I change the number of medals showing?
A: Go to AdminCP > Appearance > Style Properties > Message Elements. There you can see "[bd] Medal - Maximum" at the very bottom. Set the maximum value to 0 to show them all.
Q: Is there any way to specify display order?
A: There is an option in AdminCP > Home > Options > [bd] Medal to configure the display order. It can either be award date or by medal display order.

Two factors that make this suggestion possible are answered here. Users can still be awarded as many medals as they can possibly receive, however, a limit can be set on the number displayed. Not given or removed or added or made, but displayed. Users can also change the display order of the forum medals that have been awarded. By limiting the number of forum medals visible on the forums to 10 (or other customizable amount), and by letting users pick and choose which medals are moved to the top of their list to be displayed, forum "spam" will be reduced and medal collections will be preserved.​

Plugin or custom addition:

Xenforo Medal System
https://xfrocks.com/medal-system/​

One suggestion per form:

I Understand.​

 

I for one have not memorized the progression of donation forum medals. I would not want to, nor should I, spend a sizeable amount of time each day reviewing the forum medals to remember what all of the varying medals represent. Despite this inability though, I am still able to figure out with fastidiousness and ease as to how much a player has donated to the server, simply by looking at their medals below their forum profile picture. I'm not sure if you are aware of this feature, but when you click over the medal area on the mobile website, it displays what each medal represents and when it was awarded to the player in question. This feature is also available on the desktop version. If you hover your mouse over the medal icon you wish to find out more about, it tells you the same information as on the mobile website, which only takes a moment to do.

I would also like to clear up some of the confusion relating to the parallels I made between forum medals and in-game custom forum tags / economy-related ranks. Consider the following thought experiment if you will.

Upon logging into the server, everyone suddenly develops occupational amnesia. No one can figure out the hierarchical order of economy ranks. If a player with a rank equal to or above "EcoLeader" started talking in the in-game chat box, it's possible to draw the conclusion that [$$$EcoLegend$$$] is above [$$EcoMaster$$], and [$$EcoMaster$$] is above [$EcoLeader$]. Based on the fact that no other ranks have "$"s in them, logical reasoning would suggest that all other ranks must be below these. These conclusions however, are not a sure-fire guarantee of the accuracy of their validity in and of themselves.The next logical step would be to try asking for help, even for self-reliant people (if I had amnesia, asking for help would be the first thing I did).

I might try running a command like /online to see if anyone else is online that I could ask for help. With the current daily player base, it would likely display to me players in order of "Builder, Resident, Mayor, President, and likely Tycoon," and with some luck, maybe even "EcoLeader," and a "Moderator/Admin," or two. Great news! Based on this list, you can develop another high-probability hypothesis. The most basic economic rank on this Minecraft server must be Builder, and as you read down the list, the economic ranks must get more prestigious! Yet again, this is not exactly 100% foolproof.

At this point, if I were to glance at the in-game chat box and see a player's economic rank custom tag with a matching color to that in /list, I could infer it must be their highest achieved economic rank. However, if all of their ranks were shown in consequential order for which they are still technically a sub-grouping (not all Builders are Mayors, but all Mayors must be Builders), it would be obvious which ranks cost more ECD to obtain. For instance, [Builder][Resident][Mayor][President][Tycoon] UsernameZ. Yes, now we know that Tycoon must be above President, which must be above Mayor, etc. This is not the case, so we must turn to another means to resolve this crisis.

Help is becoming more and more essential as time goes on. Useful information can almost certainly be located and gathered from somewhere in the help file is ones exist, thus I would run the /help command. "Use /help list to see available help sections!" Doing so reveals that there is indeed a /help ranks section. This is exactly what we are looking for.



Seeing as the "Builder" rank does not appear on this list, it's lack of differentiating color and monetary value accurately implies it is the default rank. Knowing the hierarchical structure of economy ranks, this is confirmed by doing /help Builder and noting, "[Builder] is the starting rank!". Finally! Our memories have returned and our inferences are now proven!

Now obviously every single user logging in and developing occupational amnesia is a silly premise. But, it demonstrates that having multiple medals just for redundancy is rather silly as well. If I can easily run /help ranks or /list as mentioned in the thought experiment above, can I not also just as easily hover over a medal to see it's title or click on it to view it entire description? Could I not click, "View More Medals" to see all of the possible forum medals that a user can achieve? I do not need to know that a President is also a Mayor, Resident, and Builder, by listing all those tags in-game before their username. The same can be said for donation related forum medals.

I do not think that enabling forum medal redundancy is a compelling argument just because they signify physical, attributable, and real-life monetary value for the sake of determining that value in a split second. Forum medal spam is an issue needing to be resolved, and removing all medals besides donation feature related medals is not the solution. Removing redundant forum medals is.

Medals that are achieved in-game for “dumb irrelevant shit” as you, @Nicit6, said would actually become relevant and meaningful if the difficulty to obtain them were greatly increased and the number of medals for doing nothing other than having real money were greatly reduced.

I am not advocating all donation feature medals be removed entirely. The clutter of having 17 medals to inform people you donated $3000+ (in which the last medal is arguably impressive enough) certainly does not beat having 1 medal to show the exact same.

Mobile Forum Medal Display:


Desktop Forum Medal Display:

 

If checking to see what rank you are at merely a glance is of upmost importance, then why isn't everyone on board with adding all of their economy ranks in-game prior to their username in chat? I don't want to have to learn each and every rank in-game, or ask someone to tell me what their ranks are, or even do /list just to see what a person's rank is. I should clearly be able to see their highest rank without any effort. If it's [Builder][Resident][Mayor][President] I can tell in a nanosecond what their highest rank is, which is much more convenient than typing a simple command.

I also happen to know a ton of longtime users who worked tirelessly, dedicating hours upon hours of their free time before the "Main City Reset" to acquire their in-game ranks which took them quite literally years to accomplish. It's a considerable achievement, and they should have every right to display all of their ranks in-game. It'd be such an inane and vapid thing to lose in-game ranks over not having all of their in-game rank custom tags, and would serve to upset a considerable population of players. In your brusque reply in which you thought I was being condescending, you assumed I had omnipotent knowledge of everything ECC related, and so therefore must have known that you already realized you could hover over forum medals to view information about them. This is something I could simply not have known, and had I had to have done research to obtain that intimate working information about you would be, well, not knowing something innately.

Does /myfeatures not exist? In emergency situations, could someone not actually calculate how much their features total? In extreme circumstances, could the server owner not search through BuyCraft transactions and find the user's name in question to see what features they had purchased in the past?

Another hypothetical that comes to mind is why would players stop purchasing donation features just because they can't have 18 medals shown underneath their name on the forums? The forum medal associated with purchasing a certain amount of donation features is literally the least important factor when buying in-game features - 99% of people buy donation features to acquire skills, cosmetics, or special abilities on VMR, Skyblock, and/or Main, or even to "upgrade" their in-game custom donation feature tag, not to get a forum medal. The in-game custom tag displaying how many features you have purchased is the most prevalent and visible status identifier that there is. If someone needs help creating [Lift] signs, there's a good chance that a user with the [VIP+] in-game tag or [*MVP*] tag likely has ExtCreations and would be able to help them out. It's highly improbable that a person would go to the forums and specifically look up users with a upper-level donation feature forum medal, both because it's extremely difficult to tell how many users have a certain type of medal, and because that requires more effort than necessitated.

If you can hover over any forum medal to see what it represents, what's the point of having all 18 for users who have donated $4000+?

 

Changed the Scope of the Suggestion
@Nicit6 @Mission001 @EraNow @Videowiz92 @FuriuosGeorge @EtherealSquid @FrailDK @blgordon