Badg.us

Mozillians
#1

Hi all,

Our team (Community Ops) had been hosting and maintaining badg.us, our contact had been Chris McAvoy who was with the foundation and seems to have moved on. No one has stepped up to be our new contact, and the resources appear to be unused.

At this point we are ready to take the project down, but we really would love confirmation that it’s no longer needed by someone. Is anyone reading this able to give that confirmation, or at least familiar with the project and could let us know who we should ask?

Thanks!

#2

ping @emma_irwin @pierros

#3

I’ve just been informed that the domain expires in 6 days, so we have a bit of a deadline!

#4

are there actual badges hosted there? What was it for - the link won’t resolve.

#5

There are badges hosted there, but looking at the logs most (all?) of the traffic looks like webcrawlers. The site has been down for a few days at least. Even when it was up, the functionality for new users to create a badge was broken. Perhaps @yousef might know better, but to the best of my knowledge no-one has complained.

#6

There is more info here - https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/badg-us-domain-transfer-renewal-contact-owners/1828/11 - from our attempts to figure out what to do with it.

#7

Crosspost from another thread… Some back story, for what it’s worth: I started badg.us on my own personal server as a demo to get support to launch badges.mozilla.org on Mozilla hardware. My intent was always to build a badge service to specifically support the Mozilla community.

But, word spread about badg.us, and many parties began using my demo - e.g. K-12 teachers, libraries, other community groups beyond Mozilla. This quickly grew into something I couldn’t support, and so I planned to
shut it down. I offered the badg.us domain and database dumps to anyone interested in taking it over, and some folks on the Open Badges and Community IT teams accepted. I don’t think those Open Badge folks are
actually still with Mozilla, though.

I’m not sure who that leaves as a stakeholder for badg.us. Not me, because I was going to shut it down. In a perfect world, it would be great to transition any users of that thing over to something else. But, that was not something I ever had time or interest to do.

#8

My concern is that we have badge ‘credentials’ on there, that are linked from the Mozilla Backpack. If you want to know what that looks like when badge credentials go away, see the top two in my feed:

I emailed Michelle Thorn about his, because she should have an idea - even if the badge folks are gone, if badges were issued here that people still value.

Related question if that ws the case, is it hard to transfer badge credentials to another server like badges.mozilla.org?

#9

@emma_irwin thanks! I was actually just saying to James that a trick I learned at my last job is if you want someone to treat your email urgently (and they haven’t been), suspend their service. :wink: It can be hard to understand the impact of shutting something down without seeing what things look like with it shut down.

While waiting to hear back from Michelle, we can certainly start to look at what is involved in transferring the credentials over.

#10

There’s not really an easy transfer mechanism or automatic migration tool for badges, as far as I’m aware. If there are Mozilla-related badges on badg.us, probably the best way to preserve them is to manually re-create and re-award them from badges.mozilla.org.

FWIW, there is an API for awarding badges on badges.mozilla.org (albeit under-documented), and badg.us has machine-readable JSON & RSS feeds. So… if someone had the time & interest, a migration tool might be possible. (So far, that someone has not been me. :slight_smile: )

#11

@Ioana has already filed a bug about migrating the badges https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1115103

I guess we just need to figure out if we have anyone with time and interest?

#12

I moved a post to an existing topic: Badg.us domain transfer & renewal - contact owners?

#13

Sorry - I did not added the comments/bugs here as I though are not relevant to the subjected -pined @emma_irwin to be informed.

Ithink there were many people using the badg.us till was ok ( There is another issue with the photos missing from badges - can’t remember if I filled it or not)

#14

The site is currently visible at http://ec2-54-88-56-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com/en-US/badges/awards if you want to see what badges have been awarded.

#15

It looks like there are 2763 badges, which have been awarded 10062 times.

It looks like we can also get some info to figure out when badges were created and who created them, so we might be able to use that to try and figure out if anyone is still relying on the site.

#16

The list of badges and awards both appear to be sorted newest to oldest. So badges were being awarded as recently as 2015-04-01.