You mean, the US guy who is a Diamond by holding the Aspire card to make the 10 annual overseas stays nicer? That would be me these days

I get the idea of the badges showing some level of experience, but I wonder, given the confusion here among regulars who *found* this thread, whether a newbie trying to judge the reliability of an answer based on these badges would really understand what they mean.

If I had my druthers, the system would dynamically evaluate the expertise of a given poster for a particular forum. A very basic score could be based on the number of posts and the length of time participating in a particular forum (say, Hilton). And maybe factor in # likes. A self-declared 100-nighter who spends most of them in Holiday Inn Expresses would not appear as an expert in the Hyatt forum that way.

Just now came across this:

Would be good to add the number of countries ... 195 UN total, so maybe, 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 195+

Wow...ok we are going for the ageist view!

How can it be outdated if it's a day old?

My point is do want you want to do it's your site but don't force everyone down the tiktok experience.

Give posters a choice please.

I've now changed my badges to the maximum of everything.



Seriously...what's the point?

Do you play video games? Do you go on Red dit?

No.

No.

I go on flyertalk to learn about and discuss air travel.

OK, so achievement badges have been popular in online gaming for 15+ years (and for 40 years if you want to count high score boards in arcade games). The average gamer is in their 30s and the average female gamer may even be in their mid-40s.

Likewise, "Flair" has been a staple of the world's largest forum community since as long as I can remember.

So your demeaning of badges as being for "cub scouts" is ageist in and of itself and simply out of touch. These badges in no way interfere with your ability to source information on the site and you're free to carry on doing that.

I'm not demeaning badges. Have them if you want - just don't force them on posters.

They do interfere with the flyertalk experience because you see this nonsense everytime you read a post.

This isn't an online gaming site it's a travel enthusiasts site with many well informed posters helping each other navigate the intricacies of airlines/hotels/loyalty cards etc.

If posters have a need to see or show a badge why not put it in their personal profile instead of on the main site and leave the rest of the community out of it?

I think this is related to something we came across in testing. Badges don't update in some cases unless the site's cron refreshes (once a night). When I was messing around, I inadvertently stripped away my own country badge trying to adjust the settings to restrict the badges to a single displayed badge per category.

Just to add evidence to my feedback above. Here is a clear example on mobile of how the new (quite pointless) changes interfere with the experience. With the top highlighted area taking up just as much screen estate as the actual content that we want to view, the text by CWS (sorry to use you as an example!)

I�m indifferent to badges! Personally I�m not a fan of making everything online a gamification just to keep up retention rates and attract users. Are we that short minded or have such lack of attention spans we need shiny new things waved in our face?! Rhetorical question!! FT does that through the content, knowledge, wisdom, insights itself. It�s a brilliant place for that without look-at-me badges! Have badges if it�s really been a frequently requested feature but don�t have them on every single post, every single user makes and detract from the main purpose of FT.

How does FT know how many countries I have been to?
I have been to 117 but it shows as 40.
How has it worked this out?
​​​​

Feel the Excellence�️

I'd hate to see your resume.

One issue on the desktop: Info on the left now has headings in regular type and the actual info in bold. Should probably be the other way around. Bolded type takes up a lot of space.

These seem like a gimmick and look awful on mobiles. Wasting many lines on the screen. Please allow us to turn them off. Some of us actively avoid badges/likes/shows of status online - thats all the bad parts of todays social media. I have zero interest in having users country count put in my face multiple times as i scroll. hope FT isn't drifting away from quality discussion into mainstream social media trappings of badges, likes, etc. Many forums these days are removing post counts and join dates from main forum threads to streamline and simplify everything to focus on the discussions.