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Gamifying the AlienVault Forum

December 5, 2014  |  Kate Brew

We are excited to share with you some enhancements we have made to the forum to make it more interactive and valuable to you. For those of you unfamiliar with our Forum, it’s the place to go with technical questions and to keep up on product enhancements. It also provides a place for OSSIM (our open source project) users go for support. AlienVault Labs also provides a steady cadence of updates on emerging threats and threat intelligence.

Our gamification effort is starting with awarding points. Here's how you can earn points and recognition on the AlienVault Forum:

  • When readers “Like” a post or comment – the author gets one point
  • When readers “Dislike” a post or comment – the author gets one point deducted
  • When an AlienVault Admin selects “This post deserves to be featured as best of page” – the author gets five points

See below; note you need to hover over the comments to give them the “Like” or “Dislike.” Then you can click on any contributor’s name to see their points and other information about them, such as number of posts

Our Forum pertinents:

We currently have over 14,000 registered users on our Forum.

Since September, we’ve had over:

  • 375,000 Page Views
  • 275 Discussions
  • 700 Comments

Following are a few of the enhancements related to gamification we’ve added in the AlienVault Forum since 9/14:

  • Reactions! - Points are awarded to members for their contributions! Badges (reputation) will be granted for feedback on questions and discussions.
  • "Best of" Page - The "Best of" page helps you find our community's best content. Content shows up on this page if it receives positive reactions.

We also had a major user experience refresh to the Forum on 11/15 – we call that Forum 2.1.

We haven’t created any "badges" yet, but we need to because that is kind of the point of gamification, i.e. earn points and receive rewards. Please help us out and comment on how we should do the badges. Are there any gamified sites that you particularly like? Do we need to have expertise tracks? Should we add more ways to earn points? Please help us out and comment! We’d also like to know what kind of rewards and recognition you would like.

By the way, the AlienVault Forum has grown so much that we need help -- we are looking to hire a Community Manager. If you have a background in security, and are passionate about engaging with and growing your community, (or know someone who is), apply here.

Oh, here’s another goodie: we award $250 each month for a randomly chosen user of our website who uses our ShareThis! Feature. To get into this contest, you need to sign up for any resource in our Resource Center, then, once you’re registered, click on ShareThis!

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