SmokingPipes Badges & Benefits?
- Thread starter Patrick_Green
- Start date
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Exactly. SP is one of the best things that has happened to pipesmoking since the advent of the internet.
I admire Sykes and his vision and his passion, but if I want badges I’ll join the Boy Scouts.
Well I do find them entertaining. Marketing - kinda like a customer loyalty card that gets you discounts.
I don’t like to think of them as badges. I like to think of them as flair. Do you really want to have the bare minimum flair?
Flair Office Space GIF - Flair Office Space We Need To Talk About Your Flair - Discover & Share GIFs
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tenor.com
Haha! Mike Judge is a genius!Flair Office Space GIF - Flair Office Space We Need To Talk About Your Flair - Discover & Share GIFs
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So, after a hundred posts, I wanted to chime in for a moment because I think some of you guys may be thinking more deeply about this than we did when they first happened. An (almost completely) true story:
So, a marketing person married a database person and a year or so later found they were bored one Friday night...but, instead of doing what normal married couples do when they're bored on a Friday night, they came up with badge names, he wrote some db queries and some hideous looking UI and she made little icons. And that's what they did with their Friday night. And all of Saturday too as they came up with new ones. They were amused. They thought others might be too.
For many years, the badges were very much buried in the user center--alongside some pie charts of countries a customer's pipes came from and how many pipes he/she had over time--and few people noticed them.
Years later SP did end up using the VIP badge to mean something useful to customers and--around the same time--the badges became slightly more prominent in a site redesign. We also did occasionally try to hang stuff off of the other ones, but it never really worked very well, so, aside from the VIP badge, we've basically never found a proper use for the badges.
(And many Fridays later, the story did ultimately take a predictable twist and now we have a kid, so Alyson and I are unlikely to have enough energy on a Friday night to randomly foist badges on any more unsuspecting pipe smokers).
Sykes
So, a marketing person married a database person and a year or so later found they were bored one Friday night...but, instead of doing what normal married couples do when they're bored on a Friday night, they came up with badge names, he wrote some db queries and some hideous looking UI and she made little icons. And that's what they did with their Friday night. And all of Saturday too as they came up with new ones. They were amused. They thought others might be too.
For many years, the badges were very much buried in the user center--alongside some pie charts of countries a customer's pipes came from and how many pipes he/she had over time--and few people noticed them.
Years later SP did end up using the VIP badge to mean something useful to customers and--around the same time--the badges became slightly more prominent in a site redesign. We also did occasionally try to hang stuff off of the other ones, but it never really worked very well, so, aside from the VIP badge, we've basically never found a proper use for the badges.
(And many Fridays later, the story did ultimately take a predictable twist and now we have a kid, so Alyson and I are unlikely to have enough energy on a Friday night to randomly foist badges on any more unsuspecting pipe smokers).
Sykes
Great story, Sykes.
My small collection of badges makes me smile, which seems to be what it was intended to do. I had never really thought much about the origins. I'm not surprised that people were overthinking the whole thing; that seems to be rather common in online discussions.
I'm never certain whether to view my Silver VIP badge as a medal of honor, or merely a symbol my lack of self-control. However, I've learned to accept, if not embrace, my frailties and to stop worrying and love the badge.
You must be really brassed off. How brazen!
I’ve been a “Bronze” for a few years, and it has never went away. Perhaps if you don’t buy anything over a specific time period your status is reduced or expires??
This makes sense. I think my first purchase from sp was in January a number of years back. Thanks!
If I recall, when you hit the badge tier you get it immediately and for the next calendar year. So if you hit bronze in October 2020, you’d have it for the rest of 2020 and all of 2021. You then have all of 2021 to meet the threshold again or higher to keep it or go up another tier.