Most people use IMVU badges to drive web traffic to their home page or product pages, and usually there will be a hyperlink <a> to direct you there, so you can pick up your badge. But not always, which makes it seem impossible to collect that badge. But you know me, I have a penchant for finding the back entry way. So in today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to collect a badge that has no link, and as a added bonus, I’ll show you how to grab a badge from someone whose home page no longer exists due to being _disabled or _retired.
Let’s start with my own badge panel. There’s a cute little 20px badge that shows an MJ leaf with a red-orange-yellow background. I put a purple circle around it in the diagram. When you click it, all it says is “Feisty Leaf”, which is not helpful for locating the origin of this badge. The first trick is to right-click the badge image, and choose “Open image in new tab” (assuming Chrome).
Once the new tab appears, look at the number that comes after “userdata” in the URL. That number is the user ID of the owner of that badge, in this case 46476170. Go ahead and copy this number to the clipboard.
You can navigate to the owner’s page by id using
https://www.imvu.com/catalog/web_mypage.php?user=46476170
as the URL.
If you have AP, or the page is rated GA, then the IMVU web site should redirect you to the owner’s page. If not, then you can use Plan B (below). If the badge panel is visible, you can just click “Request Badge” and it should tell you “You have received the badge”, mission accomplished.
However there are some cases where you can’t get the badge. If the owner has marked that badge as non Auto-Grant, then there’s no way for you to get that badge, period. But if the owner has merely hidden their badge panel, or if they’re disabled or retired and no longer active in IMVU, there is Plan B: the Power of JavaScript.
Let’s take the Oscar the Grouch badge. If you click that one, it will show up with a banner and link, but the link points to the manufacturer page of a retired IMVU avatar. If you copy the user ID and use it for web_mypage.php, it will just redirect you back to web_index.php, the default IMVU page. Not helpful.
However, if you navigate to anyone’s homepage who actually has badges to grant, and you check out the underlying HTML, you’ll notice this little JavaScript gem:
IMVU.grantBadge('badge-53511757-1');
It turns out this code can be used to grant you a badge from ANYONE’s page! (Actually, anyone who has badges to grant, that code doesn’t work if there are no badges to grant.) You just have to change the number to the user id, and the badges are numbered sequentially starting at 1. So while you’re on some badge-granting user’s homepage, you can grant yourself a badge from some other user’s home page. To do this, you can actually run a JavaScript statement in the Address bar:
You have to type this all out, including the word “javascript:”, capitalized and punctuated just the way I’ve done it (or it will fail, JavaScript is case-sensitive). If the owner has a lot of badges, you might have to go through this step a number of times until you finally get the badge you’re actually looking for. But at 100K cr a pop, most people don’t have that many badges. And if everything works out the way it should, you’ll receive the happy “You have received the badge” message.
Happy hunting!
