A fourteen-year-old community rewards app just got its first real rebuild. Fedora Magazine published the rebuild on August 19, 2026 Fedora Magazine, after a year of active work spanning the project’s two code repositories.
Image: Fedora Magazine
The Fedora Badges service tracks contributions across the Fedora Project and hands out digital badges for everything from packaging software to helping at release parties. For most of its life it ran on server-rendered pages. That era is over.
A faster interface, built as a single-page app
The new frontend is a modern single-page application. Pages load without full refreshes, and the layout adapts across screen sizes. Users can pick from eight colour schemes Fedora Magazine, and a dark or light mode that follows the operating system setting.
Profiles now show a radar chart mapping a collector’s coverage across badge categories, which makes unexplored areas obvious at a glance. A refreshed history page adds a timeline of contribution activity, and a “difference” view lets you compare your collection against a friend’s to surface badges you have not yet earned.
Rarity tiers turn collecting into a hunt
Every active badge now carries a rarity tier based on how many users hold it. That sounds cosmetic, but it changes behaviour: browsing by rarity makes it easy to hunt the badges fewer people have earned, which points contributors toward less-covered work.
Search is also unified. One bar now looks across both badges and users, returning results as you type once at least four characters are entered, which keeps the load off the server.
OpenID Connect replaces session logins
Behind the interface, authentication was reworked completely. The old session-based login is gone, replaced by a token-based flow using OpenID Connect Fedora Magazine, with a dedicated client so signing in through Fedora Accounts behaves consistently. Email addresses are no longer exposed in API responses; they are hashed before reaching Libravatar.
Under the hood: a leaner codebase
The data layer got the heaviest work. The Database Library project, which handles all database operations, took 105 commits across seven contributors and moved from version 1.4.1 to 1.5.5. The main Tahrir service and its API together accounted for 165 commits in the past year, and the whole project shed a net 13,320 lines of code Fedora Infrastructure GitHub. The effort, codenamed Svātantrya, lives in the Fedora Infrastructure namespace on GitHub.
Badges can now be manually marked legacy when they should no longer be awarded, without stripping them from people who already earned them.
Why it matters for the Fedora community
This was not a cosmetic refresh. After roughly fourteen years of maintenance, the people who pulled the project out of “development hell” are now passing the torch. A workshop at Flock 2026 helped shape the result, and the maintainers are explicitly asking the community to contribute and keep it alive.
For readers tracking how open-source communities measure contribution, zBrandco recently covered GitHub’s org-wide code quality trend tracking zBrandco, part of the same broader shift toward making community work visible and rewarding.
