The achievements and badges are to me quite distracting and spammy when I’m e.g. trying to see if someone actually responded, can I turn all of these off? I checked the “Notifications” category in the settings but couldn’t see a single option to do that, sadly
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Badges are rare enough; they are just there to teach you about Discourse features and tail off rapidly once you are established on the platform. I haven’t seen a new badge notification in over two months now.
You can turn off notifications for likes under Preferences -> Notifications -> Notify when liked.
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Rare enough under which circumstances?
You appear to see this from a view of someone using one discourse for a long time, I happen to report bugs to many projects but often not that many per project, so I see the same badges and annoyances over and over again and it wastes a lot of my time… (I also happen to be easier to distract so this regularly throws me off checking on something actually useful.)
I wish someone of discourse would finally see this and add an option to disable this. I have used forum software before and this is almost as bad as advertisement mail spam, not only didn’t I need this the first time I used a discourse instance but I am getting this anew for every place.
So is there really no way to turn this off?
Edit: to give you an idea, in total I got 5 badges and 1 “Thanks for spending time with us” that is a lot like “oh you’ve learned how to use this forum” (that one might be borderline useful, count it as ‘good’ if you want) as opposed to 5 actual notifications for which I’m even counting the initially suspended account and all likes. So I got more useless notifications than the ones I want to see. (or almost, depending on how you count the “spending time with us” notification) That’s not a good thing
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Fair enough, across a series of Discourse forums I can certainly see that this might get a bit annoying at some point.
Over on Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, once you have reached a threshold on any given site, you are no longer given notifications for base achievements across all the sites. Discourse, being a project by the the same people, probably already has plans to implement something similar, I’d hope. I’m looking at you @SamSaffron 
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I’d really be happy with just a simple button /checkbox in the notification settings. I don’t mind that it’s enabled by default or even if the badges were to be collected in the badges section anyway, I just really don’t want to go through all the associated notifications
Part of the problem is also they all trickle in over various days making them all a bit of an ongoing annoyance, if this was something I could deal with just right after signing up I wouldn’t mind too much (which again an option would solve)
This has been discussed before especially around ideas about adding some form of federation. https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/14?u=sam
Discourse itself is very different from SE in that there is no central authority, federation and trust is a very complex issue.
I am a bit leery to add yet another option to user settings, cause the odds of people who are annoyed by this ever finding this are real low.
One open option here is if admins deem this more of an “expert” community they can easily disable a bunch of the intro badges from the admin panel.
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IMHO the entire point of notifications is to notify when something happened. And when I register for a technical forum at least for me that does not really include random motivational… whatever thrown at me I never asked for, but when I get actual responses.
Am I really the only one who gets really annoyed by notifications that actually aren’t any? If that’s the case I’ll have to live with it, but I do find that a little hard to believe.
And believe it or not, on StackOverflow I’m fine with it. Why? Because it actually has way less with my usage, and it shows them separately from the normal notifications inbox, so I’m never like “oh maybe someone responded - … no, just badge, again.”
Edit: and my current tally in this forum is 9 real notifications with again including even just likes, and 7 badges. Even now that makes almost more misfires than things of actual interest happening. I don’t understand how everyone else does not get frustrated with the notifications…?
I agree with the sentiment, but as a lurker do not see the non-content notifications. Perhaps you are paying a penalty for being active on Discourse. Apparently the admins can turn parts of the “feature” off?
I misread this, I first thought you meant people are unlikely to be bothered. I don’t know but the first time I ever used discourse and this annoyed me the very first thing I did was go into the settings, and then the first category I looked at was the “Notifications” settings. Isn’t that the natural place to check for turning this off? Did you get any user reports from users looking somewhere else for a switch? I couldn’t think of any other place to check other than maybe the Badges panel where if I recall correctly I did check as well, maybe that could also be a good place