Poor Garden Web. A victim of the ongoing Houzz tragedy. I still wander around the forum there, but it’s just not what it once was. And the messing around that’s been done with the software over there is just… painful.
For all its warts, I think Discord is one of the better forum structures. Short of writing a custom piece of software, which seems like sandblasting a soup cracker for a focused topical forum - you just sort of have to learn to adjust to the idiosyncrasies.
Ginda,
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “badges”. I think you mean notifications?
Those should be completely under the member’s control on your preferences page, under the tabs “emails” and “notifications”.
For example, you can set your emails, so you don’t get any email notifications from the forum, or set them so you only get emails when someone replies directly to you. It should be totally under your control.
In terms of notifications when you log in the forum itself, those are under the Notifications tab on the Preferences page. You can turn off all live notifications. You can turn off any notifications when someone likes your post. A member can even adjust their settings so that other members can’t PM them.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are wanting to do, but as far as I know, you should be able to adjust notifications so they aren’t annoying.
I am overdue on upgrading here, hopefully I will get to it in the next few weeks and this new feature will appear.
Thanks, but I did mean badges. There are a bunch of badges that you “earn” by making your first post, replying for the first time, posting a link for the first time… They are arguably entertaining for someone new to discourse. But when you join your third or fourth discourse forum they are really annoying.
And discourse is now mature enough that there are lots of people joining their nth forum, and the kindly authors of discourse have added an option to turn off all the novice badges.
It’s not a huge deal, and certainly not a reason why Scott should worry about upgrading. But it’s a nice little upgrade that comes with the latest greatest version.
I thought we had ‘regressed’ to the point everybody these days expects ‘participation trophies’!?
When I was in school, the winner and maybe 2 or 3 runners-up got trophies…and they were valued.
That’s my 2 cents.
Gotcha. I have a ton of badges like most folks posting on this forum. But they don’t seem intrusive. In other words I do occasionally get a notification of a new badge (by notification, I mean the little blue circle up by my avatar in the upper right hand corner of the page) but that’s the only notification I get. To get rid of the little blue circle, I do have to click on my avatar, but that’s all. It’s pretty easy for me to ignore.
I’ve found a lot of new members don’t even know what the little blue circle next the their avatar means. Likewise, they aren’t aware the little green circle beside their avatar means another member has sent them a private message.
Are you referring to the little blue circle beside your avatar to notify you of a new badge, or is there some other notification that Discourse is sending you?
I just want to make sure Discourse isn’t sending you some other notifications you don’t want.
As an admin, seldomly (but occasionally) I’ve learned that Discourse shows something a bit different for members, vs what I see. Just want to make sure this isn’t the case here.
This is a snapshot of the little blue and green circle notification, I’m referring to, in the upper right hand corner:
Blueberry,
All that matters is the Superbowl trophy! Well see if my KC Chiefs can pull it down again.
Well, I hope your team wins, Olpea. I’ve not watched a single NFL or NBA game in 3 years…and won’t be watching this one.
I too watch very little TV. But our little KC Chiefs are beating all the big power teams. I’m naturally for the underdog, but especially so since it’s my home team.
I was thinking we should have had an NFL discussion earlier in the season. There might be more Chiefs (or Buccs) fans out there than we realize! 
Which is your favorite badge: appreciated, gives back, or respected?
Just the little blue circle. I log on, and see a blue circle, and think, “oh, someone has interacted with me”. But then it turns out it’s just some uninteresting badge, and I’m disappointed.
Thanks for the explanation. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to stop the little blue circle notifying you when a new badge is earned.
As I come to understand this topic more, I can completely sympathize with you. Your profile shows that you’ve earned 19 badges with 119 posts. That’s an average of about a badge for one of every 6 posts. I can see how those notifications would be annoying.
I can only offer that it does get better. The badges are mostly front loaded. There are a lot of “first” badges. First Like, First Link, First Onebox, First Quote, Appreciated, Autobiographer, etc. These, plus a bunch more are earned right away. Some badges are earned multiple times, but most aren’t.
As an example, I rarely get the notification blue circle for badges earned anymore. To date, I’ve posted 4818 times on this forum, and received notifications 85 total badges (counting reoccurring badges). That figures to one badge for 56 posts. But since most of my badges were front loaded “first” type badges, I probably only receive a badge notification about once every 100 posts.
I wish I could just shut off the badge notifications for you, but unfortunately I don’t think it can be done with our current version of Discourse. Nevertheless, I hope I’ve offered you some encouragement that the badge notifications do become considerably less with time.
Thanks. It’s fine. This is my 3rd Discourse website, which is both how I “earned” all those badges so quickly and also why I find them annoying, but it also means I know the end is in sight. I’m actually delighted that new versions of Discourse now have a feature to turn those off, even if it doesn’t happen to be implemented yet here, because it means I probably won’t run into this on my 4th and 5th discourse sites. 
Back to looking for relevant threads in the dead of winter…
thanks for all you do.
Hey Ginda have a look now and see if you can turn off the badges. We are now running the latest version. It looks like the notifications have more features than they used to but I didn’t see one to turn of the badges.
Looks like it’s in Preferences → Interface: “Skip new user onboarding tips and badges”.
Yup! It’s in preferences/interface, at the very bottom.
