Thanks for the heads up! My use case is that we have a website that allows teachers to build assignments, collect live student insights (like a Google Doc), and easily track student growth. We are using Discourse primarily as a place where they can learn and collaborate together. As such, we are using the badging system to award learning and collaborative achievements as shown on our badging page (http://discuss.goformative.com/badges:). The majority of the badges there are new since the behaviors necessary to earn them are specific to our purpose. With that, it’s going to be really inefficient if we need to click into a user profile to award a a badge manually. I am looking for a better way to do this.
You mentioned Groups. How could groups be leveraged?