That’s a little unfair, we’ve certainly come across people who enjoy the “completionist” aspect — and the badges generally teach and encourage good behavior. I certainly enjoy plenty of seemingly meaningless things from time to time.
Yes, I think this is good point to consider. There are some communities that put a lot of effort into custom badges.
I don’t see any user information on the /badges page to be worried about… that’s just badge name and grant count.
It seems like a safe call to hide the individual badge pages when hide user profiles from public is enabled? There’s less data there, but those are certainly directory-like pages. The intent of an admin using that setting is to protect specific user information… and that seems to fit. This information is also available on posts… but some sites also hide most posts from the public.
So then the setting would become:
hide user profiles from public
Disable user cards, user profiles and user directory for anonymous users.
Hide the user directory, user profiles, user cards, and badges earned from anonymous users
Not strongly opposed to this either, though I wonder if it’s cleaner to roll it up into the existing setting based on the admins intent to hide user info rather than creating yet another setting to be aware of?