The discussion revolves around displaying badges on posts in Discourse. outofthebox initiates the conversation, suggesting that showing badges on posts could encourage contributors and educate community members on the desired culture. The idea is to display the text title of the badge next to the member’s title, which would be hyperlinked to the badge description.
Ellibereth mentions that a theme component is being worked on to address this feature request. ChrisBeach shares concerns about the Post Badges plugin making the UI “busy” and proposes displaying badges above specific posts instead.
tshenry suggests limiting the number of badges displayed and removing colors with CSS to reduce noise. codinghorror is ambivalent about adding more pieces of flair and notes that some badges, like “N likes,” should not be displayed.
riking and oshyan argue that manually-granted badges should be displayed on the post that received the badge, excluding certain types of badges. oshyan emphasizes the value of displaying badges granted on a given post, allowing moderators to promote good dialog and reward valuable posts.
In our community, we have a team of moderators. Since we thrive on members asking questions and contributing answers, we often want to give “Great Question!” and “Great Answer!” badges in our community. However, we don’t want to give the same person the same badge for the same post. Also, we’d like for other members of the community to be able to identify the best kinds of questions and answers on the site so they can aspire to those standards.
In light of that, I am wondering if it would be valuable to be able to display some badges on the post itself? Perhaps the text title of the badge could appear next to the member’s title on that post? If that text title was hyperlinked to the badge description, it would enable other members to learn more about that badge and what it represents. This provides an ongoing way to educate members of the community on our standards and goals.
I haven’t seen an update, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been one. I still think this feature would enable a fantastic tool to provide encouragement to our best contributors and inspiration/challenge to our readers and participants. The main idea is to provide the delight of stumbling across the ‘best of’ while reading Topics in the community and having the visitor/member realize, “ok, this is the desired culture here.”
For now, the workaround I’ve created is a post in our community explaining the Great Contribution badge and linking to that badge page in the post. That seems to have helped about a dozen people.
I welcome other, better approaches to this initiative!
The Post Badges plugin is great but I got some push-back on my forum as it made our UI a bit “busy” as it was displayed next to users for every post they added.
What would be nicer (and I think in the spirit of the OP) would be to show any badge granted above the specific post for which the badge was granted.
There is certainly potential for it getting busy depending on how it’s being used. Some thoughts to reduce the noise factor would be to remove the color with CSS if that’s making the badges feel a bit too prominent (this would make them more in line with user titles and the moderator icon). I would also limit the number of badges displayed at once to those that are truly meaningful within the context of the community.
I get the general concept behind this, but if we are looking back at the OP, it feels like this is covered with post likes? I would think one of the biggest indicators of a “Great Question” or “Great Answer” would be how many likes it has.
Note that we kinda already backdoored a very minimalistic “signature” into Discourse between username, full name, and title.. granted username is not easy to change but
For certain badges - in particular manually-granted one - showing them on the post that got the badge could be a great way to highlight the post.
The “N likes” badges should obviously be excluded, as well as the “First *” badges and things like the “Scribe” badge on meta that are implied by what category or thread the post is in.
I understood this feature request differently, perhaps. Simply, the ability to actually display badges granted manually on a given post. To my mind it’s not a question of what other badges are “excluded”, it’s a much more targeted feature, with its own clear-to-me value.
Moderators and admins partly have the responsibility of guiding and improving the conversation in their forums. And hopefully we can all agree that popularity is not the best (or at least only) measure of quality. Thus the existing Like functionality is not sufficient to meet the full needs of promoting good dialog. Modmins can do some good in diversifying the conversation and rewarding/promoting otherwise less popular posts, if they’re valuable. Ideally they would have multiple tools at their disposal to do this.
Since we already have the ability to grant badges on-demand on a given post, it makes sense that such badges be optionally displayable on the post for which they were granted. This would work especially well for badges you hid from profiles and allowed granting multiple times.
Maybe there’s a better way to achieve this that I’m not thinking of? Staff color is too obtrusive for many uses, IMO.
in there now, much less adding more pieces of flair 