I can see a site setting, default off, for “allow badges on restricted categories”
Don’t see it… Where is this setting?
In my 
In a future pr contributed by the community
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is there any news about this? Our discourse is mostly internal.
Just to remember that this still exist, any plans to this?
I expect that this is not a simple change and it is worth considering some potential issues using it and developing it.
The proposed feature, a site setting, default off, for “allow badges on restricted categories”, is not inherently community-building for the entire community or forum.
So the current default makes sense for Discourse:
- Intending to build a community.
- Having all the gaming elements … in service of a higher purpose (https://blog.codinghorror.com/)
Some badges naturally force users to involve themselves outside their group simply because of the hundreds of users that need to be involved:
-
Good sharebadge -
Great sharebadge
Awarding some badges can be weird for a team who all interact in a restricted category, more so if the team also see each other face-to-face:
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First flagof a post - admittedly an unlikely situation? New user of the month
The value of a topic/post badge earned among tens of users is probably less than for the entire community of hundreds or thousands.
I do have a private community which has a restricted category for each team’s group. We could use the proposed feature but we probably won’t because we want to encourage interaction and sharing between the teams.
This topic already shows, that the decision should be done by the admin of the used discourse.
The current behavior may fit to your community. But not to our gaming community. 99% of our topics are in private categories and people asking me why the not receive badges. For us set allow badges on restricted categories to true would be exactly what we need.
I’m not arguing against what you want. 
I am saying that there are issues with implementing and using such a setting. Other forum owners who read this topic should be aware of those issues.
The proposed feature has been awaiting a community PR for two years so far. I don’t expect any movement anytime soon because it doesn’t appear to be on any feature list or roadmap.
So you might be better off running queries to trigger manually-assigned badges because you can implement that right now.
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A custom plugin or badge sql might be your best short term solution.
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Anyone still look for a solution for this? Most users in my forum contribute to restricted categories and they cannot receive deserved badges due to this issue.
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Just adding my upvote for this function, as I’ve received a couple of complaints from my members of late about badges not being awarded (all of our categories are restricted).
Thank you!