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swilford

Starting to Get Obsessed
May 30, 2010
208
730
Longs, SC
corporate.laudisi.com
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
 
May 2, 2020
4,664
23,771
Louisiana
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
Ok, well that’s pretty awesome ??
 
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judcole

Lifer
Sep 14, 2011
7,148
32,909
Detroit
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.
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. puffy
 

STP

Lifer
Sep 8, 2020
4,104
9,546
Northeast USA
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??‍♂️
 
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Chasing Embers

Captain of the Black Frigate
Nov 12, 2014
43,248
108,340
Perhaps if you don’t buy anything over a specific time period your status expires
It does a yearly rotation. My gold VIP dropped down to silver back in October, the anniversary of my first purchase from them.
 
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Jan 30, 2020
1,850
6,086
New Jersey
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.