# What has your experience been with badges in your communities?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-has-your-experience-been-with-badges-in-your-communities/69597>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Created:** [Setembro 8, 2017, 3:41am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-has-your-experience-been-with-badges-in-your-communities/69597 "2017-09-08T03:41:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![erlend\_sh](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/erlend_sh/32/119475_2.png) [@erlend\_sh](https://meta.discourse.org/u/erlend_sh)\
**Post date:** [Setembro 8, 2017, 6:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-has-your-experience-been-with-badges-in-your-communities/69597/3 "2017-09-08T06:23:17Z")

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> [@HAWK](#):
>
> They’re powerful motivators if they’re for reasonably robust goals but I think that if you have lots of them and they are easy to get then they have little to no worth most of the time.

💯

Adding on to that, if your community has gone off the rails with badges, there’s a middle road between living with it or disabling them altogether. You could disable everything except the badges that are (1) incredibly hard to gamify and (2) undeniably useful “good user” signalling.

- _received signals_ that are hard to do “tit-for-tat” schemes with, like [helpdesk](https://meta.discourse.org/badges/125/helpdesk). If someone is creating bogus questions and answers, that’s straight up destructive and should be actively deterred, possibly by disabling the badge, but I’d be quite surprised if this became a large scale problem that couldn’t be solved with occasional moderator intervention.
- Content created in special categories, e.g our [Scribe](https://meta.discourse.org/badges/127/scribe) or [bug reporter](https://meta.discourse.org/badges/114/bug-reporter) badges.
- 3rd party signals like our [contributor](https://meta.discourse.org/badges/107/contributor) or soon-to-be-added translator badge.

If your users are “gaming” these badges, it may not be a bad thing.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-has-your-experience-been-with-badges-in-your-communities/69597)._