Subscriber Tenure Badges

Benecaster can show each subscriber a small chip indicating how long they have been a member. When the feature is on, the chip appears automatically wherever badge chips render — the subscriber account page, the Supporter Wall, and anywhere the [benecaster_user_badge] shortcode is placed.

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Enabling the Tenure Badge

Go to Benecaster → Memberships → Badges and check Show subscriber tenure badge. Click Save settings.

The badge is off by default. Turning it on or off takes effect immediately — no caching to clear, no page edits required.

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What Subscribers See

Once the badge is enabled, each subscriber sees a chip labeled with their membership milestone. Labels advance automatically as tenure grows:

Labels update automatically when a subscriber’s tenure crosses the next threshold — there is nothing to update manually.

Tenure is calculated from the subscriber’s earliest active token, not their WordPress account creation date. A subscriber who cancelled and later re-subscribed retains their original start date.

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Where the Chip Appears

The tenure chip is appended to the same badge list as tier badges and manually-assigned badges. It renders in:

• The subscriber account page ([benecaster_account]) — in the badges area below the subscriber’s avatar
• The Supporter Wall — on each subscriber’s card when the wall is enabled for a show
• Anywhere you have placed the [benecaster_user_badge] shortcode

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Displaying Tenure as Text

For placements where the badge chip format is not appropriate — inline in email body copy, a custom profile card, a member-only page heading — the [benecaster_member_since] shortcode outputs tenure as plain text:

[benecaster_member_since]

The shortcode is gated by the same site-wide toggle — it outputs nothing when the tenure badge is disabled.

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Relationship to Tier Badges

The tenure chip sits alongside tier badges and manual badges in the same badge list — it does not replace them. A subscriber on the Gold tier who has been a member for two years will show both their tier badge(s) and their tenure chip.

Tenure badges are always read-only. They cannot be manually assigned or removed; they are computed from subscription history.

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For Developers

Three filters let you customize tenure badge behavior:

• benecaster_tenure_badge_milestones — replace the default milestone threshold map with your own months → label pairs
• benecaster_tenure_badge_label — override the matched label on a per-subscriber basis (fires after the milestone map is matched)
• benecaster_tenure_badge_output — replace the chip HTML entirely for custom rendering

See Customizing Tenure Badges for usage examples, including the recipe that composes the milestones and label filters together.

The feature is gated by TenureBadgeAppender::is_enabled() — a static method add-ons can call without touching wp_options directly.