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On crypto.SE I was recently greeted with the message:

"You've earned the "Enthusiast" badge. See your profile."

However, when I clicked the "profile" link in the message, I was sent to a page that listed a bunch of badges, but not Enthusiast. (It's pretty easy to tell, since Enthusiast is a silver badge, and all my previous badges were bronze.) I even managed to grab a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Screenshot

I know this is kind of a minor bug, but still, it amounts to the user interface behaving in an unexpected an inconsistent way. I thought I should at least bring it up here, so that the devs will be aware of it. Hopefully, there will be some really simple way to fix it.

Edit: As I kind of expected, the problem has fix itself while I was posting this, and the profile page is now showing the Enthusiast badge along with the rest of them. However, I'm pretty sure this is not the first time this has happened to me, so the time lag between the badge notification and the profile page updating itself seems to be a recurrent issue. (I suspect it wouldn't be quite so noticeable if the notification message didn't link directly to that profile page...)

Edit 2: It looks like this is a regression from this fix a few months ago, which changed the link in the notification message to point to the "badges" tab instead of the "activity" tab.

Basically, there seem to be two profile pages that both show your badges in descending order by time:

  • ?tab=badges&sort=recent, which the link currently points to, and which may be updated only after a delay, and
  • ?tab=activity&sort=badges, which (presumably; I can't check this until I get some more badges) doesn't have a delay.

I'd like to suggest that the link in the notification message be changed to point to the latter instead of the former.

(It used to point to the ?tab=activity page, but without the &sort=badges bit, which meant that users who had previously selected an activity filter other than "all" or "badges" were taken to a page showing no badges at all. That's what the previous change, which accidentally introduced this delay issue, fixed.)

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I'd like to suggest that the link in the notification message be changed to point to the latter instead of the former.

DENIED!

However, there's nothing preventing a specific clear a user's badge cache when a badge is awarded...which will happen starting with the next build. When a badge is granted, it'll instantly show up in your badges tab.

In the grand scheme of things, badge awards are rare...so why not have them up to date?

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  • Thanks. That is, obviously, the better way to fix it -- I was just skeptical that I could convince you folks to spend so much effort on such a minor issue. – Ilmari Karonen May 4 '12 at 12:18
  • @IlmariKaronen - we want things to operate as smoothly as you do, never hurts to ask...and some things are quite minor (like this) to fix, they just don't appear that way. To be fair, the opposite may be true sometimes as well. – Nick Craver♦ May 4 '12 at 12:22
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This should happen any time you get a badge. Your badges list on your profile is cached. It usually takes up to a minute before they will actually appear there. However, it will be instantly shown on the main /badges page once you receive it.

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  • OK, but does it really make sense to direct users to a page that has a good chance of being stale at the time when they click the link? Perhaps the link should point to /badges instead? – Ilmari Karonen May 3 '12 at 17:26
  • That's only relevant if you're online when you actually get the notification and notice it before the cache updates. – animuson♦ May 3 '12 at 17:30
  • Yeah, but I'd guess a lot of users are online when they get badges, at least if it's one of those badges you get for doing something for the N-th time. (Ps. Apparently, the link used to point elsewhere but was changed recently. Perhaps /users/NNN?tab=activity&sort=badges would be the best target?) – Ilmari Karonen May 3 '12 at 17:31
  • I think it previously just took you to the activity tab without specifically pointing to the badges sort view (which is what it does now). – animuson♦ May 3 '12 at 17:33
  • Right now it points to ?tab=badges&sort=recent -- not the same page, even if they do contain more or less the same information. – Ilmari Karonen May 3 '12 at 17:35

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