How to pause or freeze point scoring in GamiPress

Although there isn't an option to pause or freeze GamiPress (or a GamiPress leaderboard), the same effect can easily be achieved by disabling all the Points Awards.

GamiPress is a WordPress plugin that, as the name suggests, gamifies your site. In other words, it enables you to award points, badges or achievements to your users when they complete particular actions. The users with the most points can be displayed on a leaderboard, fostering a spirit of friendly (or perhaps not so friendly!) competition among your community.

Recently I was using GamiPress on a project and needed to pause or freeze it. I wanted my leaderboard to continue displaying the points that had already been awarded, without the plugin awarding any more points and changing the rankings.

A quick Google did not throw up an answer, only a short support thread in which the plugin author said this was not possible via the user interface. He went on to suggest adding a line of code to remove the GamiPress automatic awards engine:

But you can remove the GamiPress automatic awards engine (manual awards will continue working) through this single line of code:
remove_action( ‘init’, ‘gamipress_load_activity_triggers’ );

I'm assuming that the line of code would go in the theme's functions.php file or (an easier approach) be added via a plugin such as Code Snippets.

However I was able to come up with another solution that did not require adding any code, and I wanted to share it here in case it benefited other GamiPress users. It may be this approach was not possible when the support thread was written back in 2020.

1. In the WordPress back office, go to GamiPress > Points Types
2. Click on the Points Type you want to pause
3. You will now see your list of 'Automatic Points Awards'. Alongside each one, there is a blue toggle to Disable Points Award (circles in yellow below). Click all of these to pause every points award. NB Do NOT click Delete - we want to disable the awards, not remove them entirely!



4. At the bottom of the page, click the blue Save All Points Awards button

Remember that you need to Save All Points Awards rather than (as you normally would with a post or page) clicking the Update button. If you click the Update button, any changes you made to the Points Awards without saving will be lost.

And that's it! As long as your Points Awards are toggled off, your users will not be able to gain any new points for completing the associated actions. However their existing points will remain - effectively freezing any leaderboards that are displaying these totals. And when you want to unfreeze GamiPress, toggle the Points Awards back on and click Save All Points Awards again.