So it can easily be overwritten in a plugin for example.
### Added more tests to provide better coverage
We previously only had `u.silenced_till IS NULL` but I made it consistent with pretty much every other places where we check for "active" users.
These two new lines do change the query a tiny bit though.
**Before**
- You could not get the badge if you were currently silenced (no matter what period is being checked)
- You could get the badge if you were suspended 😬
**After**
- You can't get the badge if you were silenced during the past year
- You can't get the badge if you were suspended during the past year
### Improved the performance of the query by using `NOT EXISTS` instead of `LEFT JOIN / COUNT() = 0`
There is no difference in behaviour between
```sql
LEFT JOIN user_badges AS ub ON ub.user_id = u.id AND ...
[...]
HAVING COUNT(ub.*) = 0
```
and
```sql
NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM user_badges AS ub WHERE ub.user_id = u.id AND ...)
```
The only difference is performance-wise. The `NOT EXISTS` is 10-30% faster on very large databases (aka. posts and users in X millions). I checked on 3 of the largest datasets I could find.
It's very easy to forget to add `require 'rails_helper'` at the top of every core/plugin spec file, and omissions can cause some very confusing/sporadic errors.
By setting this flag in `.rspec`, we can remove the need for `require 'rails_helper'` entirely.
Zeitwerk simplifies working with dependencies in dev and makes it easier reloading class chains.
We no longer need to use Rails "require_dependency" anywhere and instead can just use standard
Ruby patterns to require files.
This is a far reaching change and we expect some followups here.
This change both speeds up specs (less strings to allocate) and helps catch
cases where methods in Discourse are mutating inputs.
Overall we will be migrating everything to use #frozen_string_literal: true
it will take a while, but this is the first and safest move in this direction
