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Or, to put it another way, being awarded a badge is not an action.

On a user's profile page, the Activity tab shows a user's activity, with subsections to show their Answers, Questions, and so on. One of these subsections is entitled 'All actions' and shows something like this:

redacted screenshot of an All Actions view, showing mostly badge-awards

The problem, as I see it, is that badge-awards - which are actions performed by the system, not by the user - easily swamp actual active actions for anyone who doesn't use actively act on a site very much.

In particular, if trying to find out when a well-established user stopped actively participating in a site, this section is basically useless, as the first n pages of 'All Actions' | 'All' will be entirely filled with badge awards.

Feature Request: add a filter somewhere in this area, perhaps here:

the last filtering step of the All Actions page

to allow Badge Awards to be excluded from the list of displayed actions.

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2 Answers 2

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I agree with the spirit this request, albeit with a modified solution. I see it as being in a similar vein as a couple other requests involving cleaning up the "All actions" tab.

Every other action neatly falls into the purpose of the tab (displaying user actions), other than badges. As you point out, badges are not actions; the user does actions to get badges, not the other way around. Badges simply do not belong on this tab.

In fact, badges already have their own unique tab outside of "All actions":

Badges profile activity page of AakashM (OP)

I present that this page is where the recently earned badge list actually belongs. Putting it here would remove it from "All actions" where it doesn't fit, and also avoid the clutter of adding a new filter that Glorfindel notes.

Moving badge information here would also relocate it to a place that one might naturally presume to find it anyway. Why would anyone looking at the user profile activity page expect to find user badge information on both the "Badges" tab and the "All actions" tab? That really doesn't make sense to begin with.

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I'm not sure this is a much needed feature. You can only get so much passive badges a year, and they're easily to skip visually because of the black boxes (OK, gray in the case of tag badges) which are relatively narrow compared to other content. Your use case is certainly valid, but how often does that happen?

The problem with adding another filter is that there's really not that much room left on narrow screens like smartphones:

enter image description here

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  • "they're easily to skip". Quick, tell me the last time Pekka was active on SO. And really, this is half feature request and half bug (doc bug at last), because 'awarded' in the way it's used here is not an action. I didn't award anything!
    – AakashM
    Jun 30 at 7:17

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