# 404 on earned badge event when badge is disabled

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/404-on-earned-badge-event-when-badge-is-disabled/46486>\
**Category:** Bug\
**Created:** [27.Июнь.2016 00:16:15 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/404-on-earned-badge-event-when-badge-is-disabled/46486 "2016-06-27T00:16:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![sam](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/sam/32/102149_2.png) [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)\
**Post date:** [27.Июнь.2016 04:51:45 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/404-on-earned-badge-event-when-badge-is-disabled/46486/2 "2016-06-27T04:51:45Z")

</div>

Yes, I agree this is not ideal.

Our `notifications` table stores information about the “reason” in a text column containing json. This happens because there are a wide range of reasons you could be getting a notification and creating a big pile of columns would widen the table a lot and decrease flexibility around notifications.

We keep topic and post number, but there is a range of other types of ids (like group mentions, invites, badges and so on)

The “lookup my notifications” query needs to stay super fast, I did not want to force joins into 5 or so tables just to determine if the source is legit. (we do ensure post notifications are legit though - deleting a topic hides the related notifications)

Historically, people don’t go about disabling badges beyond the first few weeks of running a forum. So in practice this is a very minor issue.

That said there are 2 options you have here:

- In practice nobody ever looks beyond the first 20 or so notifications, this issue will drown in a few days of active use.

- If it is really bugging you you can clean up the old notifications from the table:

```plaintext
cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c
% Notification.where('notification_type=12 AND data like \'%"badge_id":5,%\'').destroy_all

```

(5 is the badge id for welcome, destroy\_all calls object model so it will live refresh all browsers)

On our side there are a couple of things I would like to clean up.

1. Our “client side” 404 should look exactly like the server side 404, reloading a 404 page should always result in the same 404

2. We should optionally be allowed to send in a bit more information into the 404 pages. As it stands we do a `raise Discourse::NotFound` we should allow `raise Discourse::NotFound, "Badge is no longer enabled"` and float that info into the 404.

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/404-on-earned-badge-event-when-badge-is-disabled/46486)._