What are Badges?

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Badges in Discourse reinforce positive user behaviour and facilitates “learning by doing”. It is a central part of Discourse’s gamification features.

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Receiving Badges

There are two ways to receive a badge:

  1. Manually granted by an administrative user
  2. Automatically granted by the system

Furthermore, all badges have some optional properties.

  • Allow badge to be used as a title
  • Can be granted multiple times
  • Show badge on the public badges page
  • Show post granting badge on badge page

Creating Badges

Manual and automatic badges are created the same way, via the admin panel. What sets them apart is how they’re triggered.

Manual Badges

A badge can only be granted by an administrative user. See how to manually grant a badge.

Automatic Badges

Automatic badges are granted by special triggers. Discourse comes with a lot of default badges out of the box, but administrative users can also create custom ones. At their most basic, automatic badges are simple “kudos!” for users who are just starting out.

For example:

  • Added a link
  • Received a like.

Certain badges also coincide with trust levels. When you’ve attained a new trust level, you’ll receive a corresponding badge to notify you of the bump-up.

  • Trust Level 1 → Basic
  • Trust Level 2 → Member
  • Trust Level 3 → Regular
  • Trust Level 4 → Leader

Want to create your own automatic badge? Go read how to trigger custom badge queries.

Reviewing badges

You can go to /badges page of your site to view a list of all the avalaible badges, organized by group. Each badge has a :white_check_mark: at the top left corner to indicate you’ve been granted the badge. At the top right corner there is a counter of the total number of users that have been granted the badge (since the site was created). If you click at the badge, you can see more details about the badge and the users who earned it.

Screenshot_2021-05-27 Badges - Constanza Is Testing Hosted Discourse
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Badge Types and Groups

By default, badges are grouped into the following categories:

  • Getting Started
  • Community
  • Posting
  • Trust Level
  • Other

When viewing a badge in the admin panel, you can use the pencil-button button next to the “Group” dropdown to create custom badge groups.

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You can also adjust the position of each badge group as they appear on the /badges page of your site. If you need to modify the names of the default badge groups, visit /admin/customize/site_texts?q=js.badges.badge_grouping on your site to customize the text.

In addition to badge groups, badges are classified into three types. These include Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Each badge group will display Bronze badges first, then Silver, then Gold. The idea is to have the type reflect how difficult the badge is to acquire, with Gold being the most challenging.

Disabling badges

You can disable badges, and remove them from the users summary page, by unchecking the setting enable badges.

Further Reading

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