Okay, so this badge farming case is mostly harmless but feels unethical to contribute to it.
This is the same person that mysz was talking about in this post:
So, it’s been awhile since this happened, and it’s just now that I was going to post about this.* I was one of the people in those forums (both of them).
In the first of the forums that they created, the creator/forum “host” asked us to like one of their posts to get a badge on another forum the creator (and all of the other users including me) were on. (The creator was trying to get the Great Topic badge).
Then, the creator made another post to tell some of us to accept their invite to the same forum to get a “promotion” (it wasn’t worth it). So now my profile feels weird.** Also, the creator was trying to get the Campaigner or Champion badges.
While this isn’t harmful, it certainly does feel unethical (and weird; see above). Also I’m new here, so I don’t know what category to post reports and stuff.
Just note that once we joined the second forum, the creator kicked us out of the first one where the badge farming was.
*I didn’t want to feel stupid making a post that doesn’t really have a purpose (this post).
**Now it feels suspicious that a person who joined after me invited me to this forum. I don’t know, it just feels weird.
That does seem sort of unusual, don’t know what would be a reason why they are doing that.
Difficult to understand what is going on just based off of this description, could help if you can post what site this is that you are talking about, or you can e-mail that to the team if you would like to report a problem with a hosted free-trial site.
I don’t quite want to say it in public because… well… it’s a little hard to say why but I’ll just say it’s for privacy’s sake.
Better explaination
The owner has been badge grinding on another forum using the (first) forum they’ve created. He’s been fueling this motive by promising a promotion.
The owner has:
Convinced us (the users) to like one of their posts on the forum we came from. We all had accounts there, so we could like it. He wanted to get 50 likes so he could be the 5th or 6th person to get the Great Topic badge.
Emailed some of us an invite link to the aforementioned forum. He just told the selected group to redeem it so he’d get the Campaigner and if everything went well, the Champion badge. So now my profile looks weird because I joined ~2 months before him and now it says he invited me.
This is harmless but feels unethical as a contributor. I also wonder if you can un-redeem an invite because now I’ve just got to keep my profile hidden until then.
Kind of weird indeed. Sounds like he is also unaware an admin can grant badges. So with your assessment for a likely young/student or ocd with wanting to be a top contributor to his own site.
For issues you’re having on specific forums you would need to contact/sort it out with the admin(s) of that forum as we don’t moderate other Discourse sites (hosted or otherwise).
Though in general, I think some people can get giddy about achieving badges and try and ‘boost’ them. Some sites will take this more seriously than others, but ultimately it would be down to the moderation of that site as to whether it would be permitted, encouraged, or frowned upon.
As you say, it’s mostly harmless, and if it’s on a free trial site then the site will be gone in a short time anyway.
I don’t see a way to do that from admin console, on the list of badge for a user page it says “no badges can be granted,” but may be there is some other way to award a badge that hasn’t been earned you are talking about?
That is understandable + your choice, now this topic has been unlisted so is not as public as a listed topic.
If you want to speak hypothetically about non site-specific theories for community administration + moderation you can do that, but if you have serious concerns about a hosted site practicing unethical policies then that is a lot different.
I don’t know what their policies are for that but potentially they may deactivate a hosted site if there are major problems.
An admin or moderator can grant a custom badge from the user’s admin area or by using the post wrench. To grant a system badge to a user who hasn’t earned it automatically you’d need to use the Bulk Award tool, though if the badge has an ‘auto-revoke’ function then it would be removed again the next time the background job ran.
I think it best not to name the site. It seems unnecessary for this issue.
Just to be clear, how a site manages their badges is of no concern to us and we would not withdraw hosting based on that.
This does seem alarming, your account on the inital site was suspended or deleted for no clear reason other than possibly because that was a free-trial site that was ending?
Pretty much. Other than that, no reason (so were my one-minute suspensions).* Also, it was deleted, along with practically everyone else’s. ALSO also, the 14-day free trial just ended…
*The one-minute suspensions were apparently meant as a “joke.” However, I forgot because the post that was in got deleted along with their account.
Edit: I can never say all the things in one post…
(The “joke” ended when he accidentally suspended me for 4 hours and didn’t know how to revert it).
Update time! Well, I’m not quite proud of it. So, I reported the creator to the moderators on the forum he badge farmed on.
If they are continuously starting a new site every two weeks would be surprised if many people want to keep signing up for new accounts with those.
You could mention if they don’t know already there is much less expensive way to have a discourse site at about $6 a month with digital ocean servers and the standard install.
That is probably good that you reported them to moderators on site where they were “badge farming.”
Oh, well this is confusing still don’t understand what is going on.
They would still have a right to create a new forum site (generally speaking, don’t know about context) regardless of being warned not to by an administrator at some other site.
Update: The user has messaged the mods and shared it with us. For the badge grinding thing, he said that one of his posts was just a couple of likes away from getting 50, so he asked us if we could like it, but the invite thing probably won’t be resolved.
Update for the free trial abuse: In the message with the mods, he said that he started a forum, and made another for backup. When he heard that some people were willing to pay for it, he stopped making new forums. But they didn’t actually pay, so he got put in a tough situation. But he did learn his lesson about trial abuse though.
