Custom badges that you have created on your forum can be granted through the API. This is a great way to award badges without having to use custom badge SQL.
To grant a badge through the API, you need to know the username of the user that you wish to grant the badge to, and the ID (or name) of the badge you wish to grant. You also need to make sure you have generated an API key from your site’s Admin > API > Keys section (/admin/api/keys).
Finding the Badge ID
You can get the Badge ID from the badge’s URL. Go to your Admin/Badges section and then click on the badge that you wish to grant. The URL will look something like this: https://forum.example.com/admin/badges/102. The last number in the URL is the badge ID.
Making the API call
To test an API call, you can try granting a badge using curl or Postman. Here is how I grant a badge from my computer’s terminal with curl.
First, to make things easier, set an api_key variable:
api_key=yourapikey
Then to grant a badge with the ID of 102 to the user bobby:
curl -X POST "https://forum.example.com/user_badges" \
-H "Api-Key: $api_key" \
-H "Api-Username: system" \
-F "username=bobby" \
-F "badge_id=102" \
-F "reason=https://forum.example.com/t/whats-the-best-photo-youve-ever-taken/160/2"
Instead of badge_id, you can also use badge_name to identify the badge by its name:
-F "badge_name=My Custom Badge"
The reason parameter is optional. If you supply it, it must be set to the URL of a topic or a post on your site.
You should get a JSON response with details about the badge and when it was granted.