Community engagement & retention mechanics (Discord gamification + activity pressure)

[engmung]

Problem

The community is, realistically, dead right now. There's no cost to join, no
reward for taking part, and nothing that pulls people back — so we get
quantity without quality: members accumulate but activity and signal trend
toward zero. Sharing patterns, the one thing we actually want, isn't
incentivized at all.

Left alone, the Discord just decays. We likely need mechanisms that actively
encourage — or even require — participation, instead of hoping it happens on
its own.

Directions to explore

Roughly ordered soft → hard.

Rewards / progression (carrot)

• Discord level/XP system where sharing a pattern grants XP and levels.
• Roles/badges unlocked by contribution (e.g. "Pattern Author", tiers).
• Featured / curated patterns (site or Discord spotlight) as recognition.
• Tie levels to perks: early access, custom role/color, naming a preset, a
  slot in the curated showcase, etc.

Pressure / requirements (stick)

• Activity requirements: inactive for N days → reminder, then loss of
  access / role.
• Gate viewing others' patterns behind contributing your own
  ("share-to-see").
• Auto-prune long-inactive members to keep the space alive.

Open questions

• Carrot vs stick balance — forced engagement can also push people away.
  How hard do we push before it backfires?
• What counts as a "contribution"? (a posted pattern, a Pattern Lab share, a
  review/feedback, a build photo?)
• Tooling: off-the-shelf leveling bots (MEE6 / Arcane / …) vs a custom bot
  wired to the pattern-submission flow so XP maps to real contributions.
• How does this hook into the pattern submission format + licensing in Community + contribution #117?
• Success metric: how do we know it's working? (weekly active sharers,
  returning members, patterns/week vs members.)

Notes

This is a direction-setting / discussion issue — pick an approach before
building anything. Start with the lightest carrot that could plausibly move the
needle, measure, and only escalate to harder requirements if signal stays flat.

Related: #117

[engmung]

Infra note — the GitHub → Discord feed (#127) is live.

• Commits on main → #dev-log (no mention, silent firehose)
• Published releases → #announcements (@here ping)

Server default notification is set to Only @mentions, so the dev-log feed never pings members — only releases do. Gives a low-effort "the project is alive" signal without anyone having to mute channels.

This is just the plumbing, not the engagement/retention mechanics this issue is about — but it's the base those would sit on.