Goodreads Planning More Structured Support for Challenges

[scherzo♫]

New post in Goodreads Feedback group:

message 1: by Otis, Chief Architect (new) 3 hours, 23 min ago
I'd love to hear feedback from those who create and participate in the many challenges that go in in the groups. We are thinking of building out more structured support for them, and I want to make sure I don't miss anything!

What I'm thinking is something along these lines:
- We let members and moderators create challenges/achievments. These have several flavors:
- Time based (eg read 100 books this year, etc)
- Number based (eg read 80 books around the world). For these you just have to read a certain number of books that meet a certain criteria.
- Book based, where the member has to read all the books in a certain set of books (eg all mark twains definitive works, top 100 scifi books). The possibilities are endless here, and we'd want a good curation system to create quality challenges for public consumption. But we'd also have some private ones that could just be for a certain group.
- Anyone who finishes a challenge gets a little badge on their profile (with controls to show which ones you want).
- Anyone participating in a challenge gets a progress bar on their profile (again with controls to show which ones you want). This lets you show off that you are "85% done with reading 100 books in 2010", etc. I see many people doing this ad-hoc around the site.
- Any group can have private achievements/challenges
- There will be a section of curated (somehow!) challenges/achievements that anyone can participate in.

This is a very early stage idea obviously, but would love feedback on how you've used challenges in the past, if this would work for all of them, and anything else you can think of. Please keep your feedback to high-level, let's not get lost in the details of a feature that is still being flushed out.

[Usako]

Thanks PJ for bringing this post to our attention! Exciting news!! I love the progress bar since I have a personal challenge to read 60 books in a year whereas for here I might have a smaller progress bar wish. This is great!

[Michelle-Marie]

ooh, that's very exciting!

[chucklesthescot]

Yes I like the sound of the progress bar and the badge for completing challenges!