When I try to grant a badge:
I used to be able to grant badges fine. Tons of people have this very badge – I tried to grant a random badge to myself, too, and still getting a vague error.
Nothing special about this badge - no sql or anything. It’s just a badge I manually add.
Prob related to this: https://meta.discourse.org/t/badges-no-longer-visible-1-9-0-b4/66979/2?u=hawk
Our error message can be TONS better here, so leaving this open.
But the problem here is that it is expecting a link to a post or topic per the text at the bottom.
There was also a bug in badges that was fixed, try latest
Probably not this bug – I just found time to upgrade and it’s still doing it:
Wait, reason can not be “Backer!”, paste a link to a topic there or a topic id.
That’s not for generic notes? Should really ask for a “topic url” instead of “reason”, if that’s the case. Super misleading~ Thanks, I’ll try it!
EDIT: Worked by leaving it blank.
Suggested changes:
EDIT 2: Oh, I just saw this –
Heheh… maybe a little bigger. Several people responded here not noticing, either.
pr-welcome for improving the error message.
I can’t reproduce this; it seems like Discourse just ignores invalid Reasons instead of producing an error…
Change to send an error from backend if the reason was not valid was done here:
I have made the change to show the corresponding message to the user here. This needs to be reviewed:
This is fixed now. It can be closed. 
