Theia comes with a built-in award system, which is not only reminiscent of Xbox 360 Achievements and PS3 Trophies, but also serves as an incredible compliment to the activity points & rank system, by providing a sense of virtual appreciation for completing a certain task. Members receive additional activity points with the award (which you choose), and their awards are displayed on their profiles to show their various achievements.

You create the awards. This is because we realize that not everyone who uses Theia will be using Theia for the same thing. If Theia was being used in an educational manner, such as at a school, awards could be used to denote academic accomplishments with performed tasks and such. Suppose you were running a site on PC gaming; you could create awards for things like: posting a photograph of your computer, post a "how-to" tutorial, compete in a site tournament, etc. You get the point.

Creating a new award

Creating awards is done using the same tool you update or delete them with, and this is found in the "award management" area on tools, by clicking the "manage awards" tool (admin tool 166).

There aren't many fields here, and many of them may be obvious to you, but we'll go over everything here:

The name field obviously denotes that you should right in the name of the award, as it needs a title.

The description field can be used to write in exactly what needs to be done to earn the award, or a vague description of what it is about - it's up to you.

The AP field is used to specify how many activity points you want the member to receive along with the award. There is no (practical) limit, and could even be used to give 0 AP or negative AP.

The secret field is used to hide the award from the public award list, and to prevent its description from displaying anywhere the award is seen, for people who have not already earned the award. This is much like the secret achievements in Xbox 360.

The recur field is used to specify whether or not a user can receive the award more than once. If recur is set to no, then once a member has received a certain award, they will not receive that same award again.

Need some inspiration?

For the sake of giving you something to look at, in order to give you a better idea of how it all comes together and looks in the end, here is an example award system in Theia:

www.taintedthoughts.com/awards.php

If you have built an award database in Theia that you are proud of, post a comment and share it!