Also true IRL – always praise in public and criticize in private. Better for both you and for the person being evaluated.
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apologies for the necro lads.
On our forum we created some badges for the purpose of flagging known trolls which you can never fully ban, they just pop up elsewhere but also for things like, does not read, combative, etc. the badges were marked as not visible to the public…or so we thought, perhaps we’re doing it wrong - obviously…
Show badge on the public badges page - NOT ENABLED
So to my surprise when the troll and other public users can see these mod only tag badges… have i completely missed the purpose of that check box on the badge config page?
I will nonetheless install the notes plugin but the badge solution is optimal if we can have private mod only non public badges. We’re doing it this way because its far easier to identify your trolls and mark them as such then it is to continually look at new sign ups and cross reference various datapoints in the hopes of identifying new old trolls.
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That setting only hides it from the page listing all the badges, for example: https://meta.discourse.org/badges. Badges are always announced to the recipient because it’s an award system – so there’s not a way to make certain badges only visible to admins.
The user notes plugin is indeed the way to go!
Would banning their IP work, or do you think they’d be angry/savvy enough to workaround it with a VPN?
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IP and fingerprinting is ineffective between ISP and PC local privacy tools. We’ve become accustomed to evaluating terminology and phrasing to identify trolls - a remarkably good solution.
BADGE solution…bummer. but it is what it is and off to user notes we go I suppose. Thanks for the clarification around the effect / purpose of that option. 
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