Forums like ours are funded by voluntary contributions. Our interest in the plugin is to build it straight into Discourse and streamline the payment process.
At the moment we don’t even offer special content or privileges to people who contribute to the site, but we may get into that. What we would like to do at the moment is award people who have contributed financially an Ego badge.
It would be great if DL would automatically award badges in the same way as it puts the users into groups, so that the usercard displays “Donator”, possibly a mod to indicate that on their user avatar.
To make it suitable for a host of scenarios I would suggest that the dashboard allows admins to configure the badges in various ways, i.e.
Bronze Contributor: Any donation up to amount w
Silver Contributor: Any donation up to amount x
Gold Contributor: Any donation up to amount y
Platinum Contributor: Any donation up to amount z
Big Spender: Any donation above amount z
With the text and donation levels configurable.
I can also imagine there will be some organisations who don’t want to indicate the level of contribution, they may just want the badge to indicate that a user has contributed money.
It would be nice if the DL dashboard would autocreate the badges (and groups), but this isn’t really all that important, as I’m guessing that sites like ours will set their levels, groups, and badges up once and that will be it.