User defined/selected badges

asked 2010-09-10 13:36:58 -0500

Mike
81 ● 3 ● 2 ● 3

After the discussion in the previous "poll" question, I have realized that what I am really hoping for is a way to find out, roughly, what fraction of the user community uses a particular OS, tool, or something like that. For example who is an emacs user. Who is still running Fedora 3 :-) These things change over time. I may eventually upgrade to a new OS, and so on.

I think what would make this possible, and perhaps it wouldn't be too hard to implement, would be user defined and selected badges. So, if I think it would be good to know which editors people use, I could define the badges I think would be appropriate "uses vi", "uses emacs" or whatever. Then I post a "question" asking that people select one of these badges. Actually maybe I should post the question first, to see whether or not there is any support for this particular badge!

If the appropriate badge has not been create yet ("uses teco") then the person who needs it can create it. Whenever a person wants to, they can add or remove user defined badges on their profile. Then all that is necessary is to have a way to search for and/or count users who have the given badge.

Perhaps a user would have to have a certain number of points to create such a badge. Or perhaps a user could only suggest it and the administrator would have to make it happen, perhaps after gathering comments. I don't know.

-Mike