The discussion centers around the seemingly illogical order of badges on the forum. dkm noticed that the “Senior Tester” badge, with a higher requirement, appears before the “Tester” badge, questioning if this is intentional. They also observed inconsistencies in the ordering within the ‘Posting’ category, suggesting a more logical organization by type (reply, topic, link) or by progression (bronze, silver, gold).
Stephen explains that badges are grouped by type and sorted by quality (gold/silver/bronze) then alphabetically, due to the database query structure which makes reordering by other criteria difficult. He notes that user data shows most users don’,t analyze badges in this manner, primarily checking for badges they haven’t earned. dkm then asked if the order can be manually changed, and Stephen confirms this would require coding. Shauny and satonotdead both express a desire for manual reordering, with satonotdead detailing unsuccessful attempts to workaround the issue with custom levels and badge renaming, and provides an example image of the bad order.
Just wondering why the order isn’t the same for all three lines. Surely it would either make sense to have all of the reply badges on one line, then the topic ones on the next, and the link ones after that, OR have the order on each line be reply, topic, linl.
I know this is a minor thing but I just noticed it on a forum I use, and I couldn’t help but wonder why it was set up like that.
Is there not a way to manually choose the order of badges? I really don’t know the ins and outs of it, but it seems like that could be something of use
Looking at community data it’s very uncommon for people to look at badges in this way, hence the current sort order.
Most users encounter badges for the first time when they receive the notification. If they go down the badge rabbit-hole it’s typically to see which ones they don’t yet have, and they’re obvious enough due to the green check mark which appears on the corner of any badge already received.
Associating badges is pretty tricky because of the queries they’re derived from- bronze, silver and gold version of badges bear no real relation to one another. It’s possible this may change in the future, but for now this is how they behave.
You could look into renaming badges to override the alphabetical sort, anything more is going to require code be written.
