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Comment by barmstrong | Hacker News Reader

I've never tried adding achievements to my app...is it difficult to get right?

The services I like to outsource are the ones that are hard enough on their own...mail server (sendgrid), possibly hosting (heroku), recommendations (directededge). Some of them which are relatively easy, like comments with disqus, have been successful, but there is an added benefit here of letting users comment with the same account all blogs they visit.

Are achievements hard enough that users should offload them to you? Will they have to define various rules using some sort of interface you develop? I'm skeptical at first glance, but have been wrong before.

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As far as I understand, the service provided will be a respository of badges. Your site will have to determine what the badges are and when to award them to users. Then you'll let Webchiever know about it so they can store a copy. This way users have one place to show off all their badges.

In regards to how difficult it is. The repository concept itself isn't hard, but the idea is if you can get enough sites to use you then I imagine other sites will see the site as a great advertising opportunity and will want to award badges just to get visibility on the site.

The rule engine is a different story. (Of course I'm very bias) A 3rd party rule engine is useful if you plan to constantly add badges and/or change the conditions which award a badge. Otherwise you need a developer to essentially rewrite your badge awarding queries or code every time you want to make a change. Or write your own flexible rule engine with a management UI. :)

You've pretty much got it, especially the 2nd paragraph. And your right they would need a developer, or at least some familiarity with the inner workings of their own site in order to insert the code needed to award an achievement to a user. They can also manually assign achievements to users, or generate achievement claiming codes and send those out to users as they see fit.

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