So you want a shiny badge next to your name? At first the whole idea can be a bit daunting, but I'm here to break everything I know into some bite-sized chunks for your consumption.

The reason?

I spent hours scouring the internet looking for answers to the questions that confronted me while trying to achieve the 3 available achievements. I went through pages & pages of internet looking for answers. Trying to find out things like, 'why am I missing an achievement badge', 'what do I require for the various badges', 'whats the best way to get the badges'. I hope to address all the problems I had in this instructable. So you don't have to find them out yourself.

What are achievements?

Back in the old days of Instructables, when I still lurked in the shadows of the site, you would be given a patch (a sorta badge) if you hit certain milestones. This continued until May 2014 when a new feature named 'achievements' was added, essentially replacing the old 'patch at milestone' system. Patches still existed, but they are now used for sending, as Kiteman put it, "signs that somebody, somewhere, thinks you've done something cool". 'Modern Day achievements' are sort of like badges, they are given to you when you reach certain milestones, like 10 thousand views, 1 featured article etc. Simply put, they show off how awesome you are. You can find them on your profile page, under the section Achievements. They also show up next to comments you make in forums, instructables and/or your orangeboard and so are highly visible to other members.

In this recent post the achievement badges are clearly visible

Achievements come in 3 different flavors:

Bronze - The first level of achievements

Silver - The second level of achievements

Gold - The third and final level of achievements

^{*The gold achievements can be very difficult to achieve.}

There are 3 different types of achievements

There is the featured achievement, which you can get by having a certain amount of projects featured(more on that later).

There is a comments achievement, which you can get by making a certain amount of comments to other forum posts and ibles.

There is a views achievement, which you recieve by getting a certain amount of views on your ibles.

Step 1: Featured Achievement

This achievement you get from having your projects featured.

For Bronze - You require 1 featured project.

For Silver - You require 10 featured projects.

For Gold - You require 50 featured projects.

The best way to get this achievement is just to write instructables, there are a few great guides with tips for getting featured, but if you never post any articles, you're never gonna get any articles featured! Just write what interests you. Follow the tips in places like the cinic and have fun, getting an article featured is a great goal you can work towards with your projects!

Achievement icon not appearing?

I spent several hours trying to figure out why there was no featured badge next to my name when I comment. Turns out that even though I have officially achieved the Bronze medal, I require at least 2 featured Instructables in order for the achievement to be visible next to my name. A little annoying, but oh well...

Step 2: Comments Achievement

This achievement you get from commenting the various forum posts and ibles.

For Bronze - You need to comment 100+ times.

For Silver - You need to comment 500+ times.

For Gold - You need to comment 1000+ times.

This achievement is probably the easiest of the three to achieve, you don't even need an ible to achieve it. Just get stuck into the awesome community and you can get this achievement in no time. At the end of every ible there is a comment section. You can post your own thoughts and Ideas in this section. For every post, you leave in this section, you get a comment.

One of the most popular ways of increasing your comment count, and being a valued and helpful member of the community, is to comment on new projects. Once you have read this ible head over to the discover section, at the top of the page, and skim through the ibles, then leave a comment about your thoughts, it's really pretty easy.

Just remember 2 things. Firstly all comments made to this site MUST abide by the be nice policy, I think the name basically speaks for itself, but if you want to read it is is available in section #4 of the Autodesk Terms of Service documentation for Instructables found on the Autodesk website. Secondly, although Chuck Norris memes and cat photos might be acceptable in some of the other realms of the internet (Reddit anyone?), they are not appreciated here. The comments should be about the Forum post or ible, and should be positive and contain any constructive criticisms about the project, as well as anything that could aid the author.

^{*Just this once I am making an exception to the latter issue. If you want you can leave 1 comment about anything (cats, Chuck Norris, How Marvel is better than DC) below, as long as it abides by the be nice policy. :)}

Step 3: Views Achievement

This achievement you get from getting views on your ibles.

For Bronze - You need 10,000+ views.

For Silver - You need 1,000,000+ views.

For Gold - You need 10,000,000+ views.

Nope, that's no typo. You require 10 Million Views to achieve the gold medal. Remember that the next time you see one of the privileged few who have been around long enough to get the Gold achievement. This achievement is probably the hardest to achieve. To get the view achievements you will need 3 things: Quality, Quantity and perseverance. :)

Quality - Your Instructables need to be top notch. They need to be interesting, free of those buggy little spelling mistakes and they absolutely need to have good content. The reason? to rack in views. Use some of the tactics discussed around the site to create Instructables that people want to see, with content that people enjoy! Put something new and exciting out there! Because with every ible you want to be shooting for the stars (i.e. Many Views).

Quantity - You are going to need a LOT of ibles if you are shooting for Silver or Gold. Bronze can sometimes be achieved with just one ible and silver in very rare cases can be achieved with just one ible. But the most likely situation is that you will have to put out many, many ibles. Especially if you are shooting for silver or gold. Even if every ible you make ends up with 100,000 views (i.e. really unlikely), you will still have to put out at least 100 ibles to get the gold achievement. Fun Fact - The relative probability of you having 100 ibles all with 100K+ views is less than 1/1000000.

Perseverance - You need to keep at it! Any good sportsperson, writer or even gamer will tell you that the only way to succeed is to persevere. To keep trying. To keep improving on your mistakes and keep doing stuff better than before!. In Instructables this means not giving up and continuing to chase after those silly little achievements.

Just remember that Instructables is all about writing articles for fun. Sometimes it may seem like none is looking at your article, especially in comparison to the ridiculous amounts of views. But a positive way of looking at it is this. If you have an Instructable that has more than 4,000 views, then more people have read it than 95% of the new books published. (Vyger in How to have a positive outlook of your page views)

Step 4: Get Them Achievements!

Pat the achievement unicorn and congratulate yourself. If you have read this you're already well on the way to 3 Gold achievements!

I hope that this guide has helped you and that you now know everything that is needed to achieve the illusive 3 achievements. I wish you the best of luck and I hope to see you around Instructables sometime. I just want to shoutout to RbotJ for giving me a hand with the pictures because (sadly) I haven't yet got any of the achievements in silver and gold :P. Finally, I just want to put that throughout the article I used the word 'ible', it means instructable article!

^{P.S. The above achievement unicorn would be so happy if you followed me and gave this instructable a favourite! It really helps and will take less than 0.01 milliseconds if you hurry!}