Yes, we've been thinking about Gold for a long time
Medals are nice, but they are too coarse-grained to give feedback on contributions (you only know after you earn a medal, and you don't even know which contributions in that club caused you to earn a medal and which contributions were a waste of your time).
This is where Gold comes in. Your hottest contributions will earn Gold each day (think of them as micro-medals), and you will have a private console that shows which are your hottest contributions.
Basically: Medals are earned per club, but Gold is earned for each popular contribution you have made since joining Fanpop and dumped into your piggy bank for you to hoard like Smaug or spend on various preciouses.
Popular contributions will earn a lot of Gold each day, contributions that are semi-hot will earn less, and unloved duds will earn zero. What is "hot" will be determined by our dedicated army of humans and benevolent robots analyzing all activity on Fanpop.
We've worked hard to make sure Gold is fair. Don't worry, users who spam a club with a thousand identical crappy screencaps or junk wall posts will not earn gold, and cheaters will be utterly... well, you don't cheat, so no worries there.
It's clear that there are many veteran fans that have contributed across a wide array of clubs... Maybe they haven't earned a Legendary medal in one particular club, but, when added up, they have done a huge amount for fans in dozens of clubs.
Since Medals are per-club, but Gold is earned from all of your contributions, Gold is one of the best ways to recognize and reward those widely-spread-out veteran fans with numerous contributions across many clubs. You don't even need to be a fan of a club to earn Gold for a great contribution in that club.
We'll be launching the first phase of gold in the next several weeks. Your contributions have already been earning gold as we speak, so once it goes public, many of you veterans will start out with a nice fat balance.
Here's another perspective: you don't need to use Gold. If you just want to use Fanpop the way you always have, nothing will change, especially if you've racked up a few medals. You'll have enough Gold to do anything you want normally. You can just ignore that yellow number on your profile. But, if you've always wanted to deck out your profile or send someone a nice thank-you gift, now you can, and because you earned it, it will be all the more meaningful.
Gold can then be spent on:
-profile customizations like geocen's Favorite Clubs module, user profile banners, background colors, and custom modules (each of these are very inexpensive, gold-wise). By now, you've certainly seen the trio of rodent engineers we employ here at Fanpop HQ snacking in the staff kitchen. Imagine your own profile super-banner taking their rotund prairie dog places!
Users who are already big contributors with red Fanatic medals and higher will be swimming in gold, Scrooge McDuck-style, due to their countless hot contributions earning shiny new Gold every day, so unlocking a profile skin or banner will be a drop in the gold-bucket. You could probably buy it every hour of every day without making much difference in your Gold balance.
New fans, on the other hand, should learn the ropes and get some experience with what the community is about before immediately going and blinging out their profiles.
For new users, it will also help guide them to the idea that Fanpop is about contributing and collaborating with other fans to build great fan clubs, and not about inciting drama.
We'll first launch with these profile features as they are among the most requested. After this, we'll add:
-User name changing. Yes, apparently, a few people want this for some unknown reason. What the heck is wrong with bonerAlert89 ? Gold will keep this from going too crazy as it's hard enough to keep up with your 1,000 fans and all their new names each week.
-voting for replacement club banners, icons, skins, and themes (very cheap in terms of voting per club, and users with medals in that club will be able to vote for free). Giving fans control of club icons and banners has been one of the most requested features, but the concern was that the small percentage of nasty people may try to rig polls and vote unfairly if it was just implemented using a regular Fanpop poll.
The reason for spending a little Gold to vote on club banners/icons/skins/themes is multi-fold: it will reduce vote cheating as cheating bastards will have a tougher time working the system, and it also makes sure that people voting really mean it, versus just spam-voting ugly banners on every club they come across. People with new/fake accounts won't have enough Gold to rig the vote. Of course, if you have a medal in that club, you have earned the right to vote for free. Club elections for banners/icons/skins/themes will come up every two weeks if new candidates are submitted by fans. The current "incumbent" banner/icon/skin will always be a candidate, along with any new candidates.
-profile skins, profile themes, profile super banners, and future items that are more expensive, Gold-wise. More on this later, but we are talking about profile videos, gifts to other fans, fully-unlocked profiles [enter your own HTML] and much more.
Yes, profile skins could look amazing or fugly, depending on one's taste, but in the opinion of the Fanpop staff, any user who has achieved veteran status has demonstrated pretty good judgement and probably won't upload a vomit-inducing skin. In any case, if you've earned thousands of Gold, you've definitely earned the right in our book to customize things a bit.
-Another one of many new items: the "Rose-Colored Glasses". Do you despise all skins, themes, etc? Does individuality and personal expression make you want to puke? This high-value Gold item lets you customize the Fanpop world to how YOU want things to look. As the name implies, it only affects how YOU see things, not how other fans see stuff. Unless, of course, you have enough gold to gift your entire army of fan minions Rose-Colored Glasses...
-There will be an option to show or hide your total Lifetime Gold earnings, which will be public by default. Lifetime Gold earnings is just the sum total of all the Gold you've ever earned, regardless of how much you have spent. The top fans who show it will be ranked on a leaderboard.
Even if you spend some or all of your Gold, it does not reduce your Lifetime earnings number since that is all the Gold you've ever earned (and is not your current Gold balance, which is a private number shown only to you). You can also think of Lifetime Gold earnings as one's overall total Fanpop score.
-new cheat-resistant polls and quiz! Poll rigging is a bummer. We'll give poll creators two new options (they are optional and not required):
1. limit poll/quiz voting to people who have earned at least X Lifetime Gold or at least X medals. Voting is free.
2. This option requires people to spend a few Gold to vote in a poll/quiz (along with free votes for medal holders in that club). Don't worry, that Gold does not go into the poll creator's wallet. Poll cheating will be dramatically reduced because cheating bastards won't have the Gold and medals to rig polls (since they are too busy trying to cheat instead of building real fan clubs). We don't see this option being used very frequently, but it can be used for important polls.
-new cheat-resistant 5-star ratings! Veteran fans will remember 5-star ratings. If you vote something a 3,4, or 5, it will count the same as being a "Fan of it". Fans will be required to have earned at least some Gold to rate stuff and prove they are a real fan and not just a cheating bastard. We could limit rating to someone with medals, but that is hard on people who are real fans but spread out all over Fanpop, so we'll go with a minimum Lifetime Gold number. Again, rating is free. It won't cost any gold to rate; you just need to have earned some gold at some point in time to prove you are a real fan. Aside from stopping cheaters, do you really want a n00b who knows nothing about Fanpop and who has earned zero gold to have the power to downrate your stuff? If they are real fans, they will be able to rate soon enough, and by then they will hopefully have learned the Fanpop culture.
Nothing is 100% cheat proof, but it will greatly reduce cheating, and it makes it much easier to nail cheaters and ban them for life. Yes, cheaters can try to earn Gold on their cheater accounts, but that can take a long time if they have a lot of accounts, and it's easy to catch and ban them in the process. Cheating is certainly a lot harder with Gold than just creating a bunch of fake accounts instantly as is done now.
-spam-resistant walls and private messages! You will have an option in your profile to block users trying to message you or write on your wall who have earned zero gold. This is in addition to the existing filters and block lists. Goodbye, spammers!
Your personal Gold console showing your hottest items that day/week/month will be hidden/private by default, but you can share it if you want to help teach new fans what is hot and what is not.
Your contributions will earn Gold every day, and at the end of the week, you simply make one contribution to automatically collect your gold.
The first phase of Gold will be launched in the next several weeks. We'll be starting with fan profile customization and then roll out club banner/icon voting.
