Hello. I decided to make this topic, to see if you developer forum people agree/disagree that private categories can award badges.
For me, i really heavily agree to that. Because private categories is the category that usually gives me big number of likes/clicks on links.
Here’s a poll.
0 voters
Feel free to reply and reason why you chose the option you chose.
I think its a discourse feature that badges can only be awarded in public categories, however I could be wrong.
Either way, I find some of the post liked topics / replies are in discussion which is currently excluded from badges, if it is possible to allow some categories to give badges, discussion would be a good one to start with.
I’m on the wall about it, yes it’d be cool but is it really necessary? Also, the gained badges would need to be hidden to those who can’t see the catagories which I’m not certain Discourse supports.
Disagree. To visitors/logged-out users, your activity in #forum-feedback or any other private category is invisible to them. Say you get the “Great Topic” badge but your only activity is in private categories (in other words you’ve never posted in a public category). You would have the badge but it doesn’t make sense to these users that you do because to the user you have no activity at all.
Therefore this is good behavior.
This isn’t possible using discourse out of the box. The last time I saw this discussed on meta was late last year, and the stance was “maybe we’ll add a site setting in the future, it’s complicated”.
There seems to be a misunderstanding that these badges are important. They’re not. They’re not a reliable indicator of your skills as a developer or how meaningful your posts are. For example, a rant post riddled with misinformation can get 10 likes pretty easily. As far as I’m aware they’re currently not used as a metric for anything forum related.
It’s possible to create a plugin or run queries to award badges for private categories every x period of time, however it’s not worth the engineering effort or resources given the above reasoning. Maybe in the future if the badges actually get used for something?
Badges are like collectors items in games in my opinion, if you have ever played breath of the wild then I would compare them to koroks, else just think of any meaningless collectors item in a game you played.
In breath of the wild there are 900 koroks, you only need about 500 of them for actual stuff, however a lot of people spend hours of time going for the last 400.
Now you may think that’s for bragging right, but breath of the wild is a single player game.
People like to have things such as badges just to collect, to know they are there. For example I know buildthomas once used post approval in bulletin board just so he had every obtainable badge on the forum. Badges may not have meaning to others, but they are definitely fun to collect.
And I know this will be disputed, but I believe they can also show your rough skill of using the forum, especially in the later badges. For example you scroll down on someone’s profile and see six gold badges then you can presume this person know a how to make a good post, you see 4 bronze badges and you presume they are relatively new.
Now this is a bit of a theory which I don’t actually have backing to, but I am under the impression that the post approval badge can greatly contribute to promotion to regular, however as I said I could be wrong here and this only applies to one of the many badges.
Overall, ye I just find they are cool targets or collectors items which cause me to log in every day to help me towards getting that golden eye badge 
I definitely agree with the “collector’s items” analogy and it is a good one. Props to you.
I think the difference here is it was done partially for the meme. And plus #bulletin-board is a public category. But it does prove your point that people like collecting them.
Not all of them though. Getting 50 likes on a reply/topic doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a forum expert. You likely got lucky. Tons of users who are lucky enough to get first reply in #updates get like-related badges easily.
Yes, I completely agree with your updates point where I feel people are trying to post deliberately for the purpose of gaining likes, if it were possible to disable badges for any category I would choose announcements, however in general, at least badges like good topic can only be obtained by people who have actually been able to write a good topic.
And yes, from the content of the post it was definitely a meme, however I feel there was definitely an aspect of wanting to have every badge.
We don’t use the “nice/good/great/popular/hot/famous” badges for metrics or forum progression, which are the badges that would be awarded in private categories. There’s no functionality or usability benefit which justifies dedicating resources to change the behaviour. Wanting to collect all the badges isn’t a sufficient reason.
If there was a site setting which could be toggled, this would be more feasible. But as far as I’m aware, there isn’t. It hasn’t been implemented by discourse. A query would need to be continuously run or a plugin would need to be created, tested, and maintained (bug fixes, discourse updates potentially breaking it, etc). This is a lot of work for a visual change.