Rank badges — ranks and badges for NodeBB forums

I wrote a plugin in which a rank is earned through post count, reputation or both at once. By default there are six levels, from ‘New at the bench’ to ‘Builder’, and administrators, moderators and any chosen groups get a badge of their own instead of a rank. Everything is set up in the admin panel, in English or Polish: names in each language, thresholds, colours and images. The panel checks the settings before saving and warns about things like a rank nobody can reach or a group that does not exist. The rank’s name stays in the reader’s language even when the forum loads more posts without a page reload or a new reply arrives live. Text typed into the panel cannot slip any code onto the page, and images are only accepted from safe addresses. To keep the forum fast, finished badges are kept in memory and group membership is checked once for the whole page rather than separately for every post.

The plugin runs on forum.wirelab.pl, where every rank has a shark or hedgehog image. I released it under the MIT licence on npm and GitHub as nodebb-plugin-rank-badges. Before version 1.1.0 it went through an audit that found 27 things to fix, from the rules for awarding ranks to small bugs in the panel. I fixed all of them, and 33 automated tests now cover the rank rules, the settings checks and the security measures.