A community that I participated in quite a bit was badge collecting. On IMVU users can create badges that are essentially little ads for your webpage/store. Users would place the badges on their badge canvas as just a way to to support each other or simply just to personalize their profile cards.
(some examples of badge canvas)
Types of Badges
Autogrant: This is the most accessible badge. These are available to anyone through autogrant on the owner’s profile. This is the kind of badge most of the big creators would have because it was essentially free advertising when other users had them on their avatar card.
Requestable: There were also badges that were available to everyone but you needed to request the badge from the owner.
Catalog Badges: Some badges are only available if you purchase specific items or multiple items from a creator’s shop in the catalog. These badges could be ones that are sent as a “thank you for shopping with us” kind of gift. There are also badges that you purchased through the catalog and the owner would send them to you.
Mystery Badges: There badges were usually intended to be more difficult to collect. The description of that badge wouldn’t have the owner’s information either on purpose or the links and images were just broken. You could always find out who the owner was from the image of the badge though. Everyone has a unique user number and you could just look at that to find out where the badge came from. Some mystery badges with autogrant, some you had to donate credits to receive and some weren’t available at all.
Unavailable: Some badges were simply not available at all. It could be the owner’s account it inactive. They are just exclusive for their friends or themselves. Simply they were just not available to anyone.
When exploring IMVU to make this page I noticed the badge levels were color coded. I'm surprised I never noticed that before, because I would have felt some kind of elitism for the color as well as the number of badges. There was almost an unspoken competition on who could have the most badges. Collecting badges was very time consuming so that takes some dedication. There were other websites that still exist outside of IMVU that would help you with collecting as well. There used to be scripts that would help you request all the auto grant badges on a user’s profile, but that still took a significant amount of time.
(badge levels)
The price of badges seems to have stayed the same, they are 100,000 credits per 20x20 square most the time, but IMVU does have half-off sales pretty regularly. As far as I remember the biggest the badges would usually be was 40x100px. The max size is 100x100px, which wasn't very common before but they seem to be more popular now.
It is possible there were bigger ones back them but I don’t remember seeing them. Badges have changed a lot now; they can be animated which was not a thing when I was collecting them.
Anyone can make a badge though, but because of the price they were out of reach for most users. To alleviate that the badge community would crowdfund badges to be made. A user would make a post in one of the badge groups seeking donations for the badge, usually you would need to have the image of the badge ready, how many donations you are looking for, how exclusive the badge is. Most badge collectors wanted more exclusive badges, ones that others didn’t have or were hard to get.
The organization of badges has improved significantly since 2010. You're now able to search by creator name which is convenient. You use to have to look through all of your badges to find specific ones you wanted to display. So looking though thousands of them was pretty annoying.
