Forum achievements on a phpBB3 board?

Question

I recently started a new community. The forum software is phpBB3, and so far so good. In an attempt to make my community more unique and interesting, I had to idea of having user achievements. Let me give you a quick run-down.

Each user has achievements that they can earn (these will probably be across all users), for example an achievement for when a user hits 1,000 posts, when they upload an avatar, when one of their topics gets 1,000 views and so on. Each achievement has points, for example an achievement like uploading an avatar will be 10 points and reaching 10,000 points will grant 50 achievement points. If anyone here plays World of Warcraft you may be seeing where I'm getting the ideas from. :)

What I'm struggling to get my head around though is how exactly to code this... I could keep a record of all users activity and add it to a special database table possibly, and then check via cron every minute or so if any user has met achievement criteria... but then I also want it controllable through the ACP so I can easily add new achievements and change their points etc. My mind is pretty blank when it comes to anything but the most simple things.

What I really posted here for was feedback on the idea and how you all think I should go about doing this. The coding part should be pretty simple for me once I get my head around how phpBBB MODs need to be written.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your replies. :)

Answer 1

Have you checked out this mod?

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1696785

It's in beta at the moment but it looks like it's sorta what you're trying to accomplish. Even if it isn't, you can always take it and make something else out of it. I have heavily modified existing mods to suite my site. It takes a little while to get your head around how things are done with phpbb3 but it is easy when you start doing it.

In regards to creating your own, I don't think this has to be done on crontab. You could simply inject a function into the relevant parts of code.

With post counts, there is already a function that updates the description under the avatar of users based on certain post numbers, you could probably put an extra function update_achievement() there. Same goes with the avatar being updated. Unfortunately, taking this approach you will not be able to edit the achievements completely from the ACP but you could possibly have an interface that could enable/disable certain achievements.

You will obviously need an extra table or two for this. Without thinking too much, I would have 1 table that has 2 columns, user and acheivement_id. Then another table which just lists the acheivements ids and descriptions etc..