Badge that grants badge-giving privileges

Feature
1

What if admins could grant a badge that in turn would grant the receiver the ability to award other users one or more specific badges? The idea came to me when reading about the Translator Badge and how the Transifex API isn’t sufficient to automate this.

Scenario #1

One prominent translator of each language is given the “Language Maintainer” badge. This gives them the ability to grant other users the “Translator” badge.

Scenario #2

A game development community would have many different sub-leaders with their own sub-communities of team-mates, contributors and fans. They could make great use of an ability like this, to an extent which an automated system never could.

This badge could also be retractable, meaning an admin could revoke the badge and give it to a new user, passing on the torch.

3 Likes
2

Very nice idea, it improves and favors forum user’s involvement.

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3

Interesting idea that sounds good in theory.

But I worry that some excluded members might feel it to be a bit

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4

That’s why I’m suggesting it as an extension and not a core feature. I completely agree that this wouldn’t work with all communities. Probably the bigger the better, because then cliques that you don’t care about are essentially invisible to you.

Take Reddit’s many sub-reddits and their respective “flair” badges for example.

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Badges don’t grant privileges, the privileges grant the badge.

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6

Ah. I was under the impression that some special badges could grant you a new title, so I just rolled with that.

Maybe that’d make this extension more complicated then, as the privilege would have to be granted as a very limited moderator role.

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Yeah, that’s a boolean flag on the badges. For example: Discourse Meta Upper-right.

Here’s a quick diagram of what is happening with the trust level badges.

  Auto Promotion
        |
        V
    Privilege <- manual
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        V
Database Condition -> Badge <- manual
                        |
                        V
                      Title <- manual

I could manually grant the “Elder” badge, or manually set your title to “Elder”, but neither of those are going to give you the ability to close a topic, while TL4 would.

What you want is user ACLs.

2 Likes
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Sorry to waken an old topic.

As far as I can tell, badges are still only awarded by system and admins/mods. What about creating a class of user assignable badges? On the forum I moderate I would like users to be able to tag/vote some other user as “Originality Expert”, “Electrical Expert”, “Mechanical Expert”, for example.

This would help users seeking information about how to solve a specific problem, if they could see that some user who has provided a response to their question is a “recognised Expert”. It would be breathtaking if I could weight or filter my search hits based on expert badges.

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Having no way to moderate this whatsoever seems risky though. Very prone to abuse.

I don’t condone my “badge that grants privileges” idea any longer since that’d be super complicated, but I still wouldn’t mind seeing Badge Nominations:

Sounds like that might fulfil your use case pretty well too.

2 Likes
10

Thanks for the heads up. Nomination would be my preference. Still a bit of admin overhead for the assignment of the badges, but once the ball gets rolling I guess I could rely on the existing badge holders to nominate new candidates.

It’s a car forum. Although I am an expert in a few things, I am not in a position to recognise who the experts are for a different model, or skillset which I am not expert at.

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This is now implemented using groups and group managers. Write a badge on group membership, and giving users group manager lets them grant it.

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