User badges suggestions

[IvyKeepMommy]

A little background... I've just opened a second board similar to my first, but with a larger audience (my first board is a local mommy group with 200+ members to discuss our kids and plan activities within the local area). This board will be a national group (requested by my local members since many of them have friends/family out of state and would like to have a similar forum they can share with non-local moms.

A very regularly and enjoyed part of my first forum is the use of badges to identify member information at a glance. A mom may wish to display a toddler badge and a pregnancy badge, while another mom may wish to display that she bottle feeds and cloth diapers her infant and also has a teen (that would be 4 badges). Additionally, we have a map of our state with each county in red that members can optionally display to help the other moms know how close each person lives to the other.

On the first board I have these set up as publicly joinable user groups that each have a rank badge associated with it (not dependent on post counts). Right now that means I have something like 80 different user groups and ranks for this.

Can anyone suggest a BETTER way to get a similar functionality for the badges other than using the user group/rank system. I still need it to be something the individual member can opt into for themselves.

If the user group/rank system is the best way to handle it, I've encountered two problems -- the first is that I can't reorder the rank system, so I can't change the order in which the badges display. (So while I'd like all the kids badges to display together, that won't happen because other user groups were added in between the different age user groups). Over time this had led to a messy ordering system.

The other problem is that I'm having some difficulty properly stacking the badges. I'd ideally like to have two rows of badges, but since they are all user opt in badges, some people wind up choosing multiple ranks that stack and it leads to a messy vertical display, rather than a clean horizontal display.

I'm also curious if there is a way to limit which user groups people can join (for instance only allow them to pick ONE county (or state on the 2nd board) to represent themselves).

Thanks for any suggestions or help on picking the best way to do this... I haven't done anything for the 2nd board yet and my users are getting antsy waiting or it (especially the ones who belong to both boards so know what I do on the first site).

I've attached a view of one of my posts so you can see what I'm talking about.

Thanks in advance for your time, help and comments.