I’m not a fan of new badges being turned on by default.
We don’t use most of the native Discourse badges so I have them turned off, but there was an awkward situation just now when someone received this:
I knew nothing about it and his ‘um, wow, thanks’ response was a bit awkward.
I think it’s an awesome initiative and will go down well in lots of communities, but it’s not something that we’ll use and I don’t think it should be enabled by default – at least not without notifying the CM.
Discourse changes all the time. I like to think I keep abreast of things by spending a lot of time reading here. But I understand that most don’t have that luxury.
At one time I considered trying to write a plugin that compared an existing site_settings.yml against the newer file, but it’s still on my “maybe someday” todo list.
Do you think something like that would be adequate to prevent most serious gotchas?
i.e. These Settings are new - be aware!
It would be helpful for me, yes.
I remember having a convo with someone about this a while back. I’d love it if Discourse had a What’s New / News widget on Dashboard like WP does.
I think the easiest to implement would be a link to “commits since your version”.
But I don’t see that as being the most user friendly. Kind of like sending a newbie to a W3C RFC. Everything needed is there, but can it be digested?
I guess we could petition the Discourse team to use descriptive commit tags so they could be filtered.
But I’m thinking changes in the site_settings.yml file would catch most things that would be important to forum users.
That already exists
And on the upgrade page
However, if you are hosted by Discourse (and I believe @hawk is), they sort of handle upgrading you… so you still might not get a chance to see what changed.
Out of curiosity @hawk, do you have all badges disabled or just a select number of them? As I know there is a global setting for ALL badges, setting is enable badges
Hmm if badges were disabled globally this is a bug. But I don’t think you disabled badges globally? You should disable badges globally if you don’t want badges.
Otherwise this is very much by design.
I think there is merit for a badge system is on but no stock badges are enabled by default, mode, but it is a rather rare use case
My personal preference would be that new badges (and other such changes) be preffed off by default, but that when an admin/leader logs in after the update, they have the option to enable them.
As an alternative, could it perhaps be that the preferences become available a week or so before the functionality (with a “what’s changing” notice), so that admins have the opportunity to pre-emptively disable them? I’d be happy if this was a way to set preferences by typing in a key (like Firefox’s about:config), and these were communicated via email (or announcement here) ahead of the release.
Would there be merit in something like this?
In that scenario, do users ever advance through trust levels automatically? I’m curious if the trust level badge contains the logic for advancing, or if the badge merely triggers on some other test succeeding.
In any case, I think defaulting to badges off is not such a great idea, but I can see merit in a setting for the default badge status:
Badges default to: [ enabled | disabled ]
And then a list of all the badges with current settings:
Nice Post: [ explicit enabled | explicit disabled | site default ]
Great Post: [ explicit enabled | explicit disabled | site default ]
…
I’m with @HAWK on this one. I’d love to see a better (more interactive) system for badges that are added. Two of my sites are closed, log in only environments, with one using SSO. As such, we’ve disabled a number of badges that are unobtainable in this setup, like shares and invites. One has no reply-by-email, so the email badge is disabled.
The most recent badge may be an extreme example (first badge to send a PM), released near end of month so it was awarded quickly - but it caught me by surprise too when I saw the PM in email logs. Some type of “a new badge has been added, check it out here” on the admin dashboard would likely be enough.
我也花很多时间在这里阅读，但不知为何，我有时会错过一些非常关键的讨论。这个新功能也完全是悄无声息地出现在我面前的，而我是通过这个话题才知道它的存在的。感谢 @HAWK 提醒我们！我现在正和我的版主团队一起探索这个功能，以决定是保留还是禁用它。
也许 Discourse 团队可以更警惕一些，及时通知所有用户（尤其是付费客户）那些可能会“强加”到我们社区中、可能需要被禁用的新功能。
话虽如此，我对 Discourse 团队持续不懈的努力深感感激，他们致力于开发和完善这款令人惊叹的软件。我对它以及改进的速度和范围感到非常满意。我对它的发展方向没有任何抱怨，完全信任 Discourse，并且每天都为软件的发展感到惊叹。
另外，我不是付费客户，所以我非常愿意接受这种通过持续的 git 提交来呈现变更的方式，也习惯了一个站点重建后，在接下来的几天里会连续出现多次重建，因为新功能在不断调整，漏洞也在不断修复。寻找变化和发现新功能就像寻宝一样有趣（有点像复活节彩蛋寻宝），而且报告漏洞后能很快得到修复。我经历过更新后出现不愉快惊喜的次数，一只手就能数过来，甚至只需伸出几根手指。即便如此，那也不是什么大事，很快就解决了。我的社区也没有任何抱怨。
如果因为团队不得不反复推敲每一个新功能，花更多时间回顾过去，过分担心对现有安装的影响，从而导致改进的速度和创造力放缓，我会感到难过。
我认为对我而言，最好的办法是关注 Contribute > Feature 这个分类，这样我就能收到该分类下所有新帖的通知，即使这意味着我会收到一些我不需要看到的关于功能请求的通知。
We have all native badges disabled but use custom badges.[quote=“codinghorror, post:6, topic:61371”]
You should disable badges globally if you don’t want badges.
[/quote]
I definitely do want badges. 
But I want to be able to choose which ones, and I don’t want new ones that I don’t know about to be activated by default.
This is such a rare use case though. Can’t say when we would get to that.
It’s a big change to make new badges not activated by default?
It’s not on our roadmap for the forseeable future, no.
/me does the PR-welcome dance, with full ruffles and flourishes
Ok, fair enough.
Is there an easy way to know when new badges will be added?
Actually my real issue here isn’t so much the badges but the fact that users are receiving messages from me that I wasn’t aware were being sent.
What are the criteria that kick this message off?
You can learn everything there is to know about the new feature that prompted this topic over here:
这实际上给我带来了许多多余的提醒，因此我将再次取消对 Contribute > Feature 的关注。
请千万不要放慢开发进度，但如果您能的话，请尝试以官方方式沟通那些正在实施并将出现在 tests-passed 分支中的功能。
