Badges in Discourse reinforce positive user behaviour and facilitates “learning by doing”. It is a central part of Discourse’s gamification features.
Receiving Badges
There are two ways to receive a badge:
- Manually granted by an administrative user
- 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
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:
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.
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 
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.
Badge Types and Groups
By default, badges are grouped into the following categories:
- Getting Started
- Community
- Posting
- Trust Level
- Other