Any interest in a "badge aggregator" service?

[sturmhauke]

If you have sigs enabled, you can see that I have a lot of badges from challenges. Other forum users have a lot of badges to show off too. I can't fit all of them, lol, so I was thinking about making a website where you can do something like give it a list of badge images and make a gif out of them, or make an overlapping stack image. What do you all think, is this something people would be interested in?

[FleshJeb]

That's a neat idea. How about a site challenge-makers can access and assign badges to your profile. Instead of having badges in your sig, you could have a link to your profile on the site, similar to the KerbalX link in your sig. Perhaps it could be managed AT KerbalX, so we don't have to have a new account somewhere else.

[sturmhauke]

2 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

Perhaps it could be managed AT KerbalX, so we don't have to have a new account somewhere else.

Hmm, there's an idea. @katateochi, what do you think? How hard would it be for me to write a plugin that you could attach to people's KerbalX profiles? I'm a professional web developer BTW.

[katateochi]

I like the idea, although I think having gifs in signatures might become annoying and distracting, but if you have more sigs that you have space for you could just have a random subset that's generated on each request.
Should be quite simple to implement too.
The bit that concerns me would be the server load/hosting costs.   If it was just a static image then that could get served from KerbalX's Amazon S3 bucket and with CloudFlare for CDN and caching (which is how the current KX sigs are served), then the S3 costs won't be too bad (but they won't be nothing either) and that traffic doesn't touch the KerbalX server so load isn't a factor.  If it's an image that gets changed on each request or periodically, then that would put a load on the KerbalX server and this forum could generate quite a lot of traffic. 
TL:DR, I like the idea, I'm just worried about the hosting costs and server load.

[sturmhauke]

Yeah when I say gifs, I don't mean like anything too flashy. I was thinking a gradual fade in and out transition between badges. But I could see how a whole thread full of even that could get annoying.

The randomizer idea is interesting. You could reduce the load by doing something like a cache with a TTL of 1 day, so it's not constantly hitting a generator script.

[Benjamin Kerman]

Flashieness has nothing to do with the costs, what matters is how much data has to be generated and transmitted, If you have a 20 second long gif, it's very heavy compared to a single photo. 

[sturmhauke]

3 minutes ago, Benjamin Kerman said:

Flashieness has nothing to do with the costs, what matters is how much data has to be generated and transmitted, If you have a 20 second long gif, it's very heavy compared to a single photo. 

Yeah I get that, I was just talking about the annoyance factor. Also, I was thinking of just a simple frame swap or basic fade in/out, so I'm not talking about hundreds of frames here.