)
Some badges are forced to appear first, I think ... and as the code base evolves of course this probably will change. But ... yeah, it's one of those things where you put stuff into a table in the order you want them to be in, and then SQL grabs them in its own nefarious order. I'm sure there's SOME order to them in order for some to appear toward the front, but getting them in any particular order by hand using the moderation controls is a total crapshoot.
Also, it destroys the history of the badges. That doesn't often matter, but on the moderation side we can see who added what badges when, and that can sometimes give us forensic info if someone creates a new profile and wants to move a couple badges, or things like that.
It would be nice if people could order their OWN badges as they'd like, like re-arranging the order of images in galleries. That would be cool. Heck - even let people toggle badges on or off if they want to reduce the badges shown by their name. That would rock.
Any devs out there wanna try this?