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.
(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.