Thoughts on the Nostr Badges Feature for BOLT.FUN

So we are planning to add a new feature for BOLT.FUN which is Nostr Badges.

This post is just some thoughts on different points that occurred to me while thinking about it.

First things first, a few things to keep in mind about Nostr Badges:

- They are un-revokable

- Ideally, the user should be able to show them on other platforms. (Platform Independent)

Why do we want badges in BOLT.FUN??

• To Encourage users to do more of certain activities (posting more, helping others, participating in tournaments, ...etc)

• To Give Recognition to users who are already doing this.

What are the badges that we want to create??

We haven't decided on them yet. But ideally, they should be for things that are valuable, & not very easily attainable.

Cause if something is very easily attainable, it's not that valuable or it doesn't mean much really.

(Although there should probably be some easy badges for specific first-time things like: "Publish Your First Story", "Publish your first project", "Complete your Profile", ...etc.

How do we want to give the awards??

Meaning, do we want to automatically give away some awards or do we want it to be manually??

While it could be done automatically for some specific awards, I think the manual approach has several pros over the automatic one.

- Much harder to trick.

Cause in the case of automatic awarding, the user can easily publish an empty story (or a hundred!) or publish an empty project, & he will get the award.

- Feels more valuable (personal)

When you know someone manually issued you the award, it immediately has more value to it.

- Easier to implement 😆

At least initially.

Cause keeping track of many things to be able to automatically reward on things will require no small work, so probably in a next version we do that.

How do we know that a user should be given an award at some time??

For example, he has written 10 stories now, how do we know that we should give him an award now??

This can either be done automatically (somehow). We automatically detect that a user achieved a certain task, then we send a notification to an admin saying something like: "User X achieved task Y & he deserves award Z, please give it to him :)"

The other way is: "The user himself sees that he now deserves award Z, so on each award card, we show some button saying "Claim Award", that when clicked will send to the admin a messages saying something similar to the above.

How do we display the awards on the user's profile??

We have 2 main of awards to be displayed there:

• Awards he already have

• Awards he CAN have

The first one is clear.
For the second one though, the "CAN" part is important.

There might be some awards that the user could have gotten but didn't (for example: 1st place in legends of lightning tournament).

This kind of awards can't be attained by everyone, so it doesn't make sense to show them on the user's badges page if he doesn't have them.