Badges - When do you get them?

I have a radical proposal that would resolve all problems/questions with badges

Let's turn off the badge functionality entirely

Job done

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Personally I think there would be a good utility for them if they were exclusively related to the number of solutions provided.

I tend to take the answer from someone who has Karma > 500 more into consideration than someone I've never seen on the Forum before. Unless the content of the answer is very convincing.

EDIT: giving a badge for number of posts tends to increase garbage publishing...

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During the days when it used the SMF framework, the forum was configured to exclude posts made in the "Bar Sport" category from the user's post count.

The current Discourse-based forum includes all posts made in all categories in the post count.

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Thanks for the update :+1:

Honestly did not know that.

Badges for the Arduino forum are a way to recognize and motivate user contributions. They can increase the quality of discussions by encouraging users to provide helpful, informative, or creative responses. They can also strengthen the sense of community by showing appreciation and feedback from other users.

However, it is possible that badges can also have negative effects if they are misused or abused. For example, some users might post just to get badges, without caring about the content or relevance of their posts. This could lead to more garbage in the forum, lowering the quality of discussions and making moderation more difficult. In addition, awards could lead to competition or jealousy among users, which could worsen the climate in the forum.

Therefore, it is important that badges for the Arduino Forum be designed and awarded in a meaningful way. Awards should consider not only the quantity but also the quality of contributions. They should not serve as a reward or punishment, but as an incentive or recognition. Likewise, badges should not lead to a hierarchy or division among users, but to cooperation and diversity.

You have just made my point. No need for dozens of badges. One is enough to recognize users for useful information and motivate them to still doing it.

People that are interested in rankings can apply for a job on armed forces of their countries or look for that anual statistics that´s sometimes published (see here the example).

I wanted to write a text that explains every point of view.

But for me it is not important whether you abolish them or not. I would like to keep them. But my question at the moment is how many answers you have to write in order to get the badged.

Can that be changed? For example, I think this topic would be better categorized as "Bar Sport" and definitely shouldn't contribute to one's post count.

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I don't find any mechanism for doing so in the forum settings and I also didn't find anything about it from some research.

I think the exclusion of posts in Bar Sport from the post count as done in the SMF days was reasonable and I would be willing to implement the same exclusion, but I'm limited in what I can do by the capabilities of the forum framework.

If anyone can provide information about how such a thing might be done in Discourse, I'll be happy to investigate. The free open source Discourse forum framework is extremely popular so there is a lot of information on the Internet about the administration of Discourse-based forums.

Thanks for checking. I think it's worth looking into. It's probably worth not publishing what categories are on that list, as well. :sunglasses:

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Think the exclusion of bar sport from posts/badges is something many of us could come to an agreement on.

BTW I do NOT consider this a seperate topic just one that is definably related to the topic in hand.

If there is a way @dax1 might know ?

@krishna_agarwal @pert
I created a table in Microsoft Loop where you can see all the badges (the ones without information). In the third column I gave the estimation, how many contributions one must write, so that one comes further. In the second column I chose one of the first users who wrote the least posts. You are welcome to edit it!
Mircosoft Loop

Or here, but there you can not edit it!

Badges Article Estimate
Newbie 1 1
LeGuin 48 more than 1 -> LeGuin
Lovelace 91 90
Telkes 240 200
Hopper 454 400
Sagan 541 500
Lamarr 683 600
Edision 1000 1000
Faraday 2600 2000
Tesla 8000 8000 (6000?)
Shannon 12100 10000
Brattain 16300 15000
Jackson 27400 20000

@pert Thanks for the list. Do you know an admin who has access to it? The poster DojoDave unfortunately no longer exists....

Oh wow, that's a long topic to read...a quick summary :pray:?

Is it correct that you are looking for a way to exclude certain categories when assigning badges?

If so, what you are searching for is this category setting.

The setting is activated by default, but to exclude one or more categories from the assignment of badges, an admin should deselect it from all the categories that they deem not relevant.

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I am already working on obtaining the information as I promised. Please be patient.

Thank you! I also made my first guess above - that wasn't exactly easy.

Here is the tab updated, checking the queries for each badge:

Badges HAVING COUNT BETWEEN AND
Newbie 0 49
LeGuin 50 99
Lovelace 100 249
Telkes 250 349
Hopper 350 499
Sagan 500 699
Lamarr 700 999
Edison 1000 2499
Faraday 2500 6249
Tesla 6250 9999
Shannon 10000 14999
Brattain 15000 24999
Jackson >=25000 -
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I suggest that forum members be required to write a 1000 word essay about the person that each level they attain is named for and submit it to Discobot for approval. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You have the post count criteria above, so that leaves the namesakes:

I have added descriptions to all the custom badges.

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