Scribe badge not being awarded for subcategories

[khenmu (John Sweeney)]

Hullo.

I think I’ve stumbled upon a Discourse bug here on Meta.

I posted An overview of features in Discourse Chat in #documentation:users, and Meta has the Scribe badge for posting a topic in Documentation - which I don’t have. This is what I know for sure, the below is conjecture which seems reasonable to me - but could be wrong.

Screenshot of Scribe badge for convenience

(If you’re wondering whether Scribe is periodically awarded in batches - good thinking; I wondered that myself. It has been over two weeks, though, so I think we can discount that possibility.)

When I posted the topic - or tried to, at least - I was notified that it would be held for review. Looking back at the revision history of the OP, @mcwumbly (great name & avatar, btw) is actually credited as having authored the first revision. I assume this is a product of edits he made prior to the post being officially entered into the Documentation category.

So what seems to happen is Discourse treats any changes made by staff as being revision 1 rather than revision(s) 2+, and this interferes with badge assignment for posting a topic in a specific category - Discourse gets the author wrong, because it is looking at the wrong revision.

I could see this issue potentially being a WONTFIX if the current behaviour, while unfortunate for some specific badges, is otherwise the logical way of doing things. In which case, if I could cheekily include some site feedback here, it might be worth reconsidering the Scribe badge if it is, effectively, impossible to earn for > 99% of users registered here on Meta.

Unless it’s feasible for the code that assigns such badges to somehow workaround that behaviour. I know Discourse is open source, but I’ve never been much of a Rubyist, sorry.

[JammyDodger]

I think this may actually be because the Scribe badge SQL needs updating to include the subcategories rather than just the parent category. It was noted internally during the Badge review we did the other week, but hasn’t been updated just yet while the Documentation category is going through a little structural revamp. I think that’s pretty stable again now though and I’m hoping to make the changes this week.

I’ll slide this over to site feedback in the meantime, though if you can replicate the issue of it being a quirk of the Approval queue on your own site then we can always slide it back again.

[JammyDodger]

A small update on this one - I added in the subcategories to the query yesterday and (as yet) nothing has blown up. I think that should just ‘work’ now as expected.