The discussion revolves around the idea of allowing moderators to create badges in Discourse, as proposed by alex21. alex21 believes that moderators should be able to create badges since they can already view and grant them, and sees it as part of their role in growing the community.
However, codinghorror and IAmGav strongly disagree, citing the potential risks of poorly written SQL code that could “cripple and destroy” the site. They believe badge creation should remain an admin-only task due to its critical nature.
alex21 revisits the topic, explaining their specific use case and suggesting a compromise where moderators could create and edit badges without modifying the underlying SQL code.
In a bit a similar way as this topic, I was wondering whether it would be possible to allow moderators to create badges.
Moderators can already view all badges and grant them, why shouldn’t they be allowed to create them? I don’t feel this is an action that should require an admin. On the contrary, moderators are here to make sure the community lives and grows, and badges are part of this.
In our forum, admins are mainly here for site administration, not much more. Creating badges isn’t part of the site administration in my opinion.
Necessary changes I see:
New site setting allow moderators to create badges
Allow moderators to create badges and modify the settings of existing badges
I’m coming back to this topic after some time.
On our forum we use quite a few manual badges (i.e granted on demand or for special occasions), and each time we have to ask the admins to create them for the moderators to grant them. It would be much easier for us if moderators could create and edit the badges (category, name, icon, etc) without being able to modify the SQL linked to them.
I can also fully understand that’s just our personal use case and not quite asked for, I was just wondering if it was possible to get such a feature in some way in an other and if it was hard to implement.