Stackoverflow-like user badges

Question

I've been always curious how would badges be made (like these in Stackoverflow) with PHP.

I was thinking about 3 tables for storaging the data, but how, when & why should I do the checks for earning badges.

For example: badge - first post or badge - 2000 posts.

I'm a beginner in thinking like a programmer and i'm looking for best practices and so.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 26 '12 at 12:47

3

There are basically two ways:

Check badge criteria whenever an action occurs that might result in a user receiving a badge. This is easy if you only have badges like "first post", "x posts" but nothing like "post viewed by x people"
Have a cronjob performing the checks. This is useful for things like "viewed by x people" since you don't have to perform all the checks whenever someone views something.

Of course you can also mix both solutions.

answered Feb 26 '12 at 12:47

ThiefMaster

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If your manually recording views however, it would be easy on post viewed by x people. – MichaelH Feb 26 '12 at 12:51
To record them you just need to increase the value but not read it from the db – ThiefMaster Feb 26 '12 at 13:36

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 26 '12 at 13:15

In many hosted systems, you won't be able to run cron jobs. Then I would create a checkBadges section in my PHP, so I can update badge information when user loads a page. You have to be careful and keep the code small, so you wont get performance issues. I.e. Only check for badges in reach and not those completed.

Stackoverflow-like user badges

2 Answers2