Best practice for Discourse badges

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

@burke

From a community management perspective, is it possible to have too many different badges?

This question is covered pretty well by this existing discussion:

What has your experience been with badges in your communities?

In our community, we have a problem with users collecting badges – as in, contribute in a nonconstructive way for the sole purpose of attaining badges. For instance, they might: Like every post on a thread Flag a post for no reason Mention users pointlessly etc to get the respective badges. Sometimes it’s easy to notice, but other times it’s not and we only find out because someone brags about it off-site. This is on an invite-only community where we generally try to restrict membership to m…

Short answer:

• Yes, it’s possible to have too many badges if many of them are trivially easy to get.
• However, it’s tough to have too meany of meaningful badges, i.e. human-awarded ones that you get for genuine participation in the community.