4 posts were split to a new topic: Allow skipping beginner tips when discobot disabled
Seems on all sites, users should be able to find an additional checkbox to turn off more than just the current checkbox.
There may be an age factor to the love/hate relationship with badges. The community on my forum tends to be of an older generation and some do complain about the badges being pointless and a little irritating.
There’s no right or wrong about them but it would solve the problem in one fell swoop if users could turn off the badges, or at least the notifications so the badges are more easily ignored.
1 Like
Lots of good points made by folk on the way through this discussion.
Standing back a bit to draw some principles which in turn informs the drivers for design decisions in software behaviour that then leads to developer activity to code features and switches
This fundamental question was addressed in the design of Unix and the decisions made for MS-Windows. Those once derived and understood principles may have been forgotten by a younger generation. Mobile phone UI/UX considerations constantly balance this dichotomy
The fundamental dichotomy is that on arrival in an alien environment one needs handholding in order to be able to prevent slips trips and falls. If your UI doesn’t allow immediate value generation then most users will abandon you very very fast. If somebody else’s marketing PR can point out that you don’t have a facility then you won’t even get the opportunity to compete as a decision will have been made before your users ever have exposure
As users gains dexterity or familiarity then the mechanisms required for a new user become impediments to efficient use. Psychology starts to label the aids stupid/ noisy/ chatty / lame… etc as an externalization of the frustration felt over barriers to accomplishment of known operations with the minimum of effort.
The badge system mixed and perhaps muddied two philosophical goals: one tapped into giving a dopamine hit to drive addictive behaviour, the other gave badges for first use of a feature- thus exploration of the user interface to expand familiarity- now tapping into the mechanisms that create an emotional response the frustration is to the fore - because there is no longer exploration of facilities they are now familiar. Forces are still magnetic but they’ve turned from being the attraction to now being the repulsion 
In discourse’s context a fundamental design decision buried in the past is that each instance of discourse stands alone. Indeed it may have been so encompassing and nebulous that it wasn’t even recognised as a decision at the time. One instance of discourse has no knowledge of the user’s prior familiarisation with the software.
An alternative design architecture, if the decision had been recognised might have put all forum below the users relationship with the discourse software. This architecture can be seen in the implementation of Mighty Networks.
To go back to the OP and the potentially annoying salesperson - the motivation for mighty networks was probably that this business decision makes every forum a recruiter of users that the mighty networks company has a direct ability to reach out to - in other words all your customers become recruiters for you centrally. Maybe you challenge the ethics of this (and note ethics is inescapable one of the factors in the background), whatever your opinion and choice in designing an architecture there are consequential effects - upsides and downsides. In this case it confers competitive advantage to them
Consider… .
Not THE solution but A solution would be to give of both the forum admin and the user switches to control the level of help given. Experienced users will know the switch is there and turn it off immediately. But note with just on/off for two interests there are four combinations - combinational explosion happens very quickly. It will increase software size dramatically. It has to be referenced within every other function even if only with the library call that immediately returns but with all the implications for load times memory usage etc etc - not in the silicon side (that’s probably a immaterial) but in the carbon side - there is an old acronym PICNIC.
IMH & ignorant O the entropy from the options in the discourse operating model is on the cusp of needing a simplification before it tumbles into complexity driven emergence that slowly gives new competing platforms incremental advantages of simplicity
I think this background stuff is foundational to competitive survival in the medium to long term. Not everybody in a company or a product needs to even appreciate that it is there but some people do!
Ps
I too suffer badge re-earning for skills I picked up in other discourse forum and non-discourse
2 Likes
At the risk of cherry-picking from the last post, the concept of badge-fatigue fits with the feedback I’ve had on my own forum. I don’t want to turn badges off universally but I also don’t want Discourse to irk members, many of whom are more used to ‘old style’ experiences like xenForo and phpBB.
The ideal scenario would be for individuals, perhaps at trust level 1 and above, to have an option to suppress badges for themselves.
3 Likes
All for this 
1 Like