Welcome to the brief rundown of our newest feature, achievements! I have spent a rather unhealthy amount of time developing it for the site. I hope you enjoy experiencing it as much as I enjoyed building it.

Achievements, or awards, or gamification… you’ve probably run into it before in other avenues of your digital life. Achievements are most common (and were largely born out of) the console video game world, beginning on the Xbox platform in the mid-2000s.

Basically, it boils down to this: do stuff, get (sometimes silly) awards and badges for doing it. Over the past month, I’ve designed over 60 custom badges that you can be awarded for performing sometimes mundane, other times complex, tasks across the Brewer Fanatic platform. Comment on a post, get a badge. Write a blog post, get a badge. Vote on a poll, get a badge… you get the point. Do some of these tasks multiple times and sometimes (many times) you’ll get additional badges.

If you visit your user profile page, you’ll see it now looks different, with achievements being prominently displayed near the top.

With over 60 badges available right now, some of you older, veteran Brewer Fan users will start accumulating achievements the moment you begin participating in various aspects of the site, as many (as many as possible, but not all) of the achievements are back-dated to the time you began using the site. So explore the site, try completing some random tasks like post a status update, and see if you get a badge for doing it!

As you "achieve" new things, on top of badges, you will also be awarded points. Once you hit certain milestones in points, you raise in rank (out of 14 ranks in total). In the image above, my rank is "draft eligible", the third rank you will achieve.

Here is a sampling of a few of the badges you can be awarded right now:

Some achievements will be won seemingly at random but I assure you, there is a specific set of items that awarded you the badge (and sometimes, those items need to be completed in a specific order). And some badges will be awarded manually for “exceptional” things done on the site. Those will be the hardest to collect and the rarest achievements available on Brewer Fanatic.

And if anyone manages to get them all or one of the *really* difficult-to-uncover achievements, we may have some special prizes available to users who can accomplish those rarest of feats on the site…