I’ve never been asked by a user to disable the badge notifications, but more than once we’ve discussed the idea of showing badges as a separate indicator over the avatar.
I’ve deleted pretty much all the badges on my site, one by one. My users are professionals, academics, government, health researchers, law enforcement, etc. I’d get an earful from them if badges started popping up. Ditto with Cake Day.
1 Like
You didn’t need to delete them, there is a site setting to turn off all badges…
3 Likes
Clearly I never saw that setting, but it’s good to know. Thanks.
I created an account here, just to beg you to let users turn off the useless time and attention wasting badges.
Those things can be cute for a new person who posts occasionally. The problem is that the more involved you’re in a given discourse community the more the badges are time wasteful, because you get a lot more of them. Here is my notification bar from the last day:
This is ridiculous. I want to be notified only when someone needs my help, period.
I don’t want to be notified about anything else.
So at the very least please let’s have ‘Earned whatever’ category of badges configurable by each user.
Another more specific configurable option I would like to request to be able to disable notifications when someone referred to a thread I created. I have a lot of threads/posts, why does the system waste my time notifying me about this? And why can’t I turn it off.
Social networks created a big disease of notification hell, please let’s not perpetuate it everywhere.
Thank you!
1 Like
Hi stas00 welcome to the forum
What you may not have noticed is the “Dismiss All”. If you are certain you have no interest in reading the Notifications it is a simple step to clear their unread status.
Thank you for the follow up, @Mittineague. But your proposition is not answering my needs at all.
Perhaps my message wasn’t clear, so let me try to explain again with bullets this time, so there is no space for ambiguity.
I do want notifications when:
- my input is needed, someone quoting my username in forums or pm
- a new follow up is posted in a thread I’m involved in
- a new follow up is posted in a thread I am interested in, but not participating directly
I don’t want any other notifications, in particular:
- the gamification-type of notifications.
- notified about someone linking to a thread I started, now I think twice before I start a new thread because of that “feature”. I happen to start popular threads and boy, those someone mentioned your thread notifications are a burden.
I hope it makes sense.
1 Like
Are you sure you’re referring to Discourse? There is no concept of a “thread” in Discourse. I don’t want there to be any ambiguity, so it’s clear what we are talking about.
I would like to request is to be able to disable notifications about when someone referred to a thread I created
Are you sure you’re referring to Discourse? There is no concept of a “thread” in Discourse. I don’t want there to be any ambiguity, so it’s clear what we are talking about.
100% sure. Here is how it looks in the notification (private info in the center of it removed)
If I click on that notification, the post it sends me to typically says something along the lines:
refer to this [thread] ( link to a thread I started ) for blah blah
And I’m not signed up to watch notifications for that thread that the notification sent me to.
Discourse doesn’t have threads, only topics.
I stand corrected, @Stephen. Here is an updated list using the correct nomenclature:
I do want notifications when:
- my input is needed, someone quoting my username in forums or pm
- a new follow up is posted in a topic I’m involved in
- a new follow up is posted in a topic I am interested in, but not participating directly
I don’t want any other notifications, in particular:
- the gamification-type of notifications.
- notified about someone linking to a topic I started
2 Likes
I want to add Discourse’s badges “for me” are a net negative in my life. I need less distractions not more and my user icon even showing a little number that there are new notifications is yet another distraction saying “hey! look over here! look over here!”.
In 2019 there are really too many distractions in my life. Near every feature in an app that is actively trying to distract me is a net negative in my life.
I’m not saying the feature is bad, some people enjoy the badge notifications, but for me I’d really like to be able to turn them off 100% as a user. Please consider let users turn off all badge notifications. Help up take are lives back from all the app features asking for our attention.
I think these ideas have merit. “I’m an expert Discourse user”, but how to communicate that at signup?
7 Likes
Bump. I don’t need to be told when I first @ed someone else, it’s weird.
Does this really fall under the category of “expert user”, though? Most badges don’t help you learn the platform–on the contrary, they typically only show up after you’ve already figured out how to do something yourself.
So I believe this issue is orthogonal to how familiar the user is with the platform. Some expert users may enjoy the badges, and some new-to-the-platform users may find them annoying.
As for where to put this, there are a couple of options I can think of:
-
Doing something at sign-up (as you mentioned) could make sense. However, at-sign-up options have a big usability impact, since they will be in front of literally every user, whether the option is relevant to them or not.
-
Putting an option in settings->notifications. As a new user who almost immediately wanted to disable the badge notifications, that was my first instinct of where to go, at least. The benefit of this is that it’s not in the face of users who either like badges or don’t care, but it’s still (fairly) straightforward to find for users that are annoyed. Moreover, the users this impacts most (those signing up on multiple discourse instances, and who are annoyed by badges) will quickly learn where that setting is and be able to disable it upon new sign-ups.
I’m sure there are other possibilities, of course. But these are the two that immediately come to mind.
If you can dedicate user testing resources to this to figure out what approach works best, that would of course be ideal. Users often behave in unexpected ways. But I’m guessing such testing probably isn’t on the table. So, short of that, just doing your best to reason it out and hope for the best is probably the way to go. IMO option #2 above seems like the best bet in terms of UX trade-offs.
Option #2 also just generally slots in better with the idea of giving more fine-grained control over notifications in general, and will provide a clear, logical place for more such options in the future. For example, @stas00’s request above to disable topic-linking notifications as well.
Or you can just ignore the feature request, and leave users like myself annoyed every time they sign up on a new discourse instance. Which would also be reasonable. But, of course, I personally hope that’s not the route you take. 
2 Likes
I like the idea of placing this in the prefs->notifications page, seems natural
Notify me about badges: [introductory and special badges | special badges | no badges]
Something like that.
8 Likes
If this was true 3 years ago, it is no longer true. Every time I sign up for a new programming discussion forum, I see notifications for “Earned first like, first welcome, first quote, first mention, editor, …” and on and on. All of these show a (1) in my browser’s tab, causing me to believe someone has responded to my post. These things do not need my attention. Please allow me to disable them when signing up for a new site’s discourse forum. As a new user, “Introductory and special badges vs. special badges” is meaningless to me. I’d prefer to just see a checkbox for “no badges”. The only thing for which I want to receive a notification is a response.
4 Likes
Sure I support adding the option
Slotting this for the next release
7 Likes
Yep, we have a plan, agree with all this, it’s on the 2.6 release list with preliminary mockups. edit: this is done.
11 Likes