We don't need no stinking badges?

2010-02-01T04:27:28Z

How do you know if community contributors on our site are using their real names? How do you distinguish staff reporters from community contributors? How do you know who has been featured on our front page?

This weekend, The Sacramento Press launched badges to address all those concerns and more. Badges come in two varieties: merit and identity. Identity badges identify our users, what they do and their role on our site. The staff of The Sacramento Press assigns all identity badges manually.

Assigning badges will start slowly and take time. We have eight identity badges: Editorial Staff, Sacpress Staff, Editorial Interns, County Government, City Government, Law Enforcement, Fire Department and Verified Community Contributor. When an identity badge is assigned, The Sacramento Press stands behind it.

If you are a community contributor and would like to have your name verified by our staff, you can do so at most workshops as well as some Sacramento Press events.

Over time, we likely will add identity badges to identify different types of users on our site. While badges help to increase transparency on our site they are not a replacement for contributors stating who they are in their profiles and articles.

In addition to identity badges, there are merit badges, which certify achievements by members of our site. Some of them are assigned by our staff, such as workshop badges, while others are assigned automatically by our system, such as front page badges. We hope that merit badges will help readers identify talented and hard-working writers, and encourage community contributors to learn more in order to earn them.

In addition to badges, you will find many other small updates to our site, including new and more prominent RSS feeds on the profile page, as well as the ability to easily browse all of a user's articles and comments.

We hope you like the new features on our site and encourage your feedback. There is always room for improvement, sometimes, lots of room. So please feel free to dig in below with as much constructive criticism as you can think of, plus any questions you might have. We all have thick skins. If the comment section is not your forte, please send your feedback to feedback@sacramentopress.com.

Newest articles on The Sacramento Press tagged as "merit badges"

We don't need no stinking badges?