BadgeBase in July 2026: 80 Changes in One Month
Changelog Β· 2026-07-26
July 2026 was the month a badge archive turned into a community site. Some numbers: the changelog now holds 106 entries, and 80 of them are from July. Every other month combined adds up to 26. I am writing this down because nobody reads 80 changelog lines.
π The Twitch login
The biggest piece came last: you can connect your Twitch account. The area is explicitly BETA and I keep building on it, but the frame is up.
I ask for three permissions and each has to earn its place: email for the pre-filled Badge Alert signup, emotes because that is the whole point, and moderated channels. Two more scopes I started with are gone again: the follow list and the subscription status. Both only ever displayed numbers nobody needs, and they make the consent screen look greedier than the page is.
What connecting gets you:
- Your Hype Train emotes get read and kept. The keeping is the point: Twitch serves the list in pages of 100 with no filter, and a single read never returns everything. Mine showed 73 emotes the first time and 119 after a second pass. So the collection grows instead of showing whatever one moment returned.
- The minimum level sits on every emote that has one. BleedPurpleHD from level 10, HeyHeyGuys from 25, PogChomp from 50, KappaInfinite from 100, ShouldICelebrate from 111, NeuroJAM from 123, EvilJAM from 126. Twitch does not expose this through the API, so it is hand-kept.
- Showing them on your profile, if you want. Private by default.
- The channels you moderate appear below your badges.
- Your streak counts without a detour.
One side effect I am prouder of than the feature: profile pages need no session for any of it. Login state lives in the browser, the pages stay cacheable and set no cookie. Only the notification bell gets a signed token, and that token can do exactly one thing: say which account it is.
π₯ Hype Train leaderboard
Those collected emotes turned straight into a new board: the Hype Train leaderboard shows who owns the most Hype Train emotes. Every row expands into the emotes themselves, level-gated ones ringed in gold with the level in the tooltip. Your profile shows the same count with your rank beside it.
The board only knows people who connected their account. So it grows with you, and it says so above the table.
π Achievements: from 30 to 45
July's biggest growth. New arrivals include π Hype Conductor for a Hype Train past level 50, wearing the very emote you earned on it; π‘οΈ Moderator for at least three channels; π£ Gift Bomber and π Sub Tsunami for gifted subs; β° Nick of Time for a badge claimed in its final 60 minutes; π Raffle Champ for actually winning the giveaway.
Two repairs matter more to me than the count. Early Adopter used to trust the database id, which skips in huge ranges: only 636 people qualified as "first 10,000" when many more should have. It counts the real join position now. And achievements show their numbers: "you own 10 or more heart badges" hides the fact that it is 34. Hattrick also names your biggest day instead of your latest.
Two slots sit on TBD deliberately. If you think of an achievement, tell me in Discord and it lands there.
π₯ Streaks
New in July: daily streaks. Visit your profile, the day is secured, a new day starts at midnight. Subscribers get streak protection, and one slip can be recovered. Plus the flame achievements at 10, 100 and 365 days. Since 26 July the π bell tells you when a streak day is in the bag.
π Four ways not to miss anything
July turned one channel into four:
- Badge Alert by email whenever a new global badge goes live. Double opt-in, unsubscribe in every mail.
- RSS carrying every fresh find with its official description, dates, free/paid tag and artwork. In all five languages.
- iCal, so start and end dates land in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar by themselves. Optionally only the badges you are still missing.
- The bell on the site itself. It counts what happened since your last visit, and since 26 July it sits top right instead of bottom left. With a connected account it shares what you have read across your devices: read on your phone means read on your desktop.
Plus the drop-alert box with a countdown on every badge page that has not started yet.
π Five languages, done properly
The site speaks German, English, Spanish, French and Russian. Not as a translation widget but with URLs of their own: /de/, /es/, /fr/, /ru/, full hreflang wiring and every variant in the sitemap. On a German page every internal link stays German.
And it is not just the interface. The official Twitch description of 317 badges now reads natively in four languages, with old encoding glitches ("PokΓΒ©mon") cleaned up along the way.
π Every badge has a story
Since 22 July each of the 300+ badge pages carries an editorial About This Badge section in all five languages: how it was earned, when it ran, free or paid, how many collectors hold it, where its design comes from. That is 1,590 texts, written from the archive data badge by badge. From Mod Founder to Raging Wolf Helm.
ποΈ The archive became usable
318 badges need tools. Added: filters for π free and π° paid as URLs of their own, sorting by π°οΈ oldest and π₯ most popular in the archive, a timeline that runs both ways, and the Rarest list by collector count. Badge pages also cross-link what actually fits: event badges show their family, everything else shows what is live right now.
π€ Profiles
A badge list turned into a calling card. New: a rank for everyone instead of only the top 100. Your badges from other services β 7TV, FrankerFaceZ, BetterTTV, Chatterino, DankChat, tduva and Kick β right below the Twitch ones. Your equipped Twitch badge next to your name. A growth chart. And a personal feed, reachable through the word "Collected" in the heading.
Why I collect any of this in the first place is written up here.
π Community
The supporters page shows the top gifters and newest subs of badgebase_de, with a podium for the first three. Anyone who ever subscribed or gifted in that chat automatically wears BadgeBase Viewer and BadgeBase Sub on their profile. Donations get a thank-you in Discord and in Twitch chat. And there was a Turbo giveaway.
π§Ή What went away again
Honesty belongs in a recap: I also removed three things in July.
- The emote area. The site focuses on badges. Every
/e/β¦page returns a clean 404 now. - The Amazon affiliate links on badge pages. All of them.
- The β favourite button. Hidden since 26 July, because the login does the same job better: an account Twitch vouched for beats a star someone clicked by accident. Anyone who already set a favourite keeps everything. Starting fresh goes through the login now. Whether that was the right call I genuinely do not know yet, which is why it is an experiment and not a demolition.
What comes next
The login is only getting started. The obvious next steps are emote rarity ("you own EvilJAM, 1 in 8 people here do"), achievements for Hype Train levels, and a cron that makes those emote collections more complete on its own. Which of those actually gets built is decided in Discord. And the badges of the month live where they always do, in the July roundup, which is up to 32.