I think these ideas have merit. “I’m an expert Discourse user”, but how to communicate that at signup?
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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:
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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.
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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. 
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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.
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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.
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Sure I support adding the option
Slotting this for the next release
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Yep, we have a plan, agree with all this, it’s on the 2.6 release list with preliminary mockups. edit: this is done.
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