Although I don't feel the badge system is core to the success of the forum, when there are related problems or inconsistencies they tend to cause frustration and annoyance. Myself, I've run into the same issues described in Some User Badges Lost and also wondered about broken or confusing requirements and triggers (e.g. [SOLVED] Site Badges - Where are the tutorials).
Recently, I became curious about a badge with no awardees, Out of Love, whose requirement is to "use all 50 of your daily likes". Surely someone should have this by now, given the quality of content on the forum.
So I tried an experiment... Since I haven't been as encouraging as I could have in the past , I had a lot of bookmarked posts and topics that were worthy of "likes". It didn't take long going through these before I used up my likes and got the message "You used up your likes. Please wait NN hours and try again."
Based on some Discourse forum comments, one needs to wait until the NN hours have passed and then the system will recheck the badge requirements. But even after waiting, nothing happened. Now as I stated above, getting badges isn't that important but the annoyances are real.
Has anyone else run into this or similar issues? Are there some badges that just don't "pop"?
All the badges that matter in my opinion , seem to work fine
I admit I didn’t discover the tutorial for over a year after I first joined this forum. But really, there’s plenty of other things which are more important that need our energy and attention, agreed?
@guidosarducci I think the OpenWrt devs have implemented a pretty vanilla Discourse variety - any other Discourse forum you could check this on? Maybe raise it with the Discourse devs themselves?
@dit_dah_dit Excellent, I was waiting for someone to do that. Shows you're paying attention...
As I said, none of the badges really matter in the end, but the annoyance of broken behaviour is worse than not mattering.
Never had a problem with the tutorial myself, so wondered why those badges seemed scarce. In any case, paying attention to these sorts of details is how problems are discovered and fixed. If other areas of improvement interest you by all means focus on those.
As you say, I would also hope it's pretty vanilla for the sake of maintainability. And as I mentioned in the OP, I did look up the mechanics of triggering this badge on some Discourse dev forums. (sorry, I don't have the links handy!)
One thing I'd like to see is someone repeat my experiment. Worst case, they'd be encouraging quality contributions to the forums. Another possibility could be if there are recent Discourse logs one of the devs could review. It might even uncover more than one problem. Hopefully someone like @jow could comment.
Regarding my thread about the tutorial badges. I think it's kinda cool that you have to find an Easter Egg/moderator-robot to get the tutorial. It also requires some engagement, curiosity or knowledge of forum software - by members utilizing it
It was also interesting...that it's possible to complete the Advanced Tutorial prior to the basic one (I found this out accidentally, lol)
And as a note...I just recently achieved the Empathetic badge. I wondered for a long time why nobody had ever received it...what a shock I was the first person!
I think that is only true for us old users who have joined before the discobot (who joined in Sep 2017). Based on discussion on Discourse home forum, new users get a greetings from it and can respond to get the tutorial, but us old users never got the greetings from it.
(I joined in late 2016, about 11 months before @discobot .so I never got the invite to the tutorial...)
See now we just need to program a bot called "routerbot" that can automate the answers to "which router should I buy" questions.
@routerbot recommend a router available in Brazil with at least 128 MB of RAM and 64MB of flash that works well with OpenWrt and costs less than $60USD
also @routerbot show recovery mode and factory reset
Starts one of the following interactive narratives: new user, advanced user.
@discobot roll 2d6
3, 6
@discobot quote
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you — Princess Diana
, I had a lot of bookmarked posts and topics that were worthy of "likes". It didn't take long going through these before I used up my likes and got the message "You used up your likes. Please wait NN hours and try again."
5, 5
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you — Princess Diana
You may rely on it