Oh yeah, looks nicer that way.
I use Sanc v1.0
But do you wanna follow in the Escapists' footsteps and imitate them? Why not blaze your own trail!
No one likes Frankensteining, unless you own a WordPress site
Also, it might be healthier to stop prying to model and identify this site as a site that _can_ sort of do things that another has-been forum can not.
We have been and are blazing our own trail. XD We've been doing it for over three years now. There is currently no other site like us.
None.
If there were, I would have happily just pointed everyone to that site, but it doesn't exist. And who we are now is exactly who we should be. Coming back to the badges now, you guys are saying that the implementation still isn't adequate enough, but if it was fully feature complete, would you all still not want it? It is derivative of the Escapist, yes, but then again, our entire MO is pulled almost straight from TOTSE. Having a site with freedom of speech within reasonable limits at its absolute core is not my own original idea. But it's still a very damn good idea that more sites need to have as their main focus.
"Alright, but that's a core philosophy," you might say, "not a peripheral community feature." Well... The way I see this at least is a lot like game design. If other sites did something well in the past, we should learn from that and use those same concepts on our site, generally speaking. Now of course, not everything applies to us, but in this case with the badges, I don't really see a reason why we shouldn't implement them. I should say, I wouldn't even have asked if I couldn't at least get the badges close to how they were on the Escapist. and back then, there was no badge system available that was adequate enough to serve as a replacement, so I simply let it be for a while. It is true that this is still a bit of a compromised solution and not the full thing. But I do feel that they are close enough and still allow for a lot of possibilities as they are.
At the end of the day, if you guys say you don't want them, that's fine. We'll let them go. But I do want to make sure that we're dismissing these for the right reason. And also, it does bring to mind the classic question we've asked ourselves before many, MANY times in the past. If you don't want to see this, then what DO you guys want to see?