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I have posted this as a part of an answer of mine on meta question "Approaching 1000 days on beta", but it's burried in the question and actually deserves its own post. I posted it on Meta.StackOverflow but I only got [negative] feedback from people that aren't even active on CR, so I'm posting it here to get the pulse of our little community - which I perhaps should have done before posting on MSO and getting downvoted like I've never been downvoted before - still, I got one helpful comment from moderator animuson:

@retailcoder If you want opinions from other CR members, you should have gone to the Code Review Meta. You're on MSO, which acts as the global base for all the sites in the network, and this badge would not be useful to those other sites. It's highly unlikely that the SE team would implement site-specific badges such as this, and even less likely to get much support from the entire SE community when it's not really relevant to them. – animuson♦

I have deleted the MSO post, but I'd still like to read what the CR community thinks of those, so here it is...

Current answer badges seem to focus on the votes you get out of them. Which is good to encourage higher quality answers, but not enough to encourage answering many questions - something like this:

  • bronze Resourceful: Answered 10 questions with a score of 1 or more.
  • silver Ubiquitous: Answered 80 questions with a score of 1 or more.
  • gold Encyclopedic: Answered 200 questions with a score of 1 or more.

Maybe score threshold could be a score of 2 or more and number of answers could be adjusted a bit, doesn't matter really - the idea is to encourage posting more answers (to get our 1.9 answers/question ratio up closer to 2.5), not to compete/overlap with existing "Nice Answer" & friends badges. The badge names are generic (i.e. not CR-specific), on purpose.

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    \$\begingroup\$ FYI: tag badges are awarded for a combination of quantity and score. \$\endgroup\$
    – Laura
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 22:16
  • \$\begingroup\$ Good point, ...but they're tag badges, and average 5pts per post. I'm thinking along the lines of "Quorum", where the idea is merely to encourage participation, regardless of the tags. Although yeah, there might be an overlap there... \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 22:27

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CR's problem isn't with the answers-per-question ratio, it's low votes => not enough hi-rep users. So this post should be .

Maybe a set of badges could encourage voting, but we already have:

  • bronze Supporter First up vote (7.7K awarded)
  • bronze Suffrage Used 30 votes in a day (51 awarded)
  • bronze Vox Populi Used the maximum 40 votes in a day (38 awarded)
  • silver Sportsmanship Up voted 100 answers on questions where an answer of yours has a positive score (1 awarded)
  • silver Civic Duty Voted 300 or more times (25 awarded)
  • gold Electorate Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions (9 awarded)

So...

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    \$\begingroup\$ Forever Beta? \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 4:15
  • \$\begingroup\$ If the rep thresholds of graduated sites are immutable and shared across SE, I don't see it coming unless the vote badges start getting massively awarded... \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 14:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ Oh and I forgot the badge awarded for the first downvote.. "Critic", awarded 40 times. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 18:29
  • \$\begingroup\$ Well, technically, only upvotes matter for bringing up new high-rep users. :-) I don't encourage mass upvoting of all the top users below 10K, though. The system will see that as serial upvoting and reverse it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 23:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ 10K users should get upvotes too, when we graduate we'll need 15K users :) (serial upvoting only applies when you pick a user and upvote more than X posts of his - 3-4 should be ok although it's not a "normal" voting scheme) \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 23:20
  • \$\begingroup\$ Or more mods. ;-) They possess ALL privileges, regardless of rep. But seriously, we do need more 10K+ users. I know I won't be there because of my number of answers and time spent on the site. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 23:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ Give it some time, no one gets to 10K in minutes (ok months) - you're doing pretty good actually, at this rate you're earning about 3K /year, the "Yearling" badge asks for 200 :) \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 23:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ Jon Skeet can! ;-) I know I still need to answer as many questions as I can. As I've noticed, I've rarely received rep from older answers. I feel this is because CR isn't showing up enough in search engines (which is why we must maintain good titles for questions). \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 18, 2013 at 23:53
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I did catch your MSO post, and I sort of agree with them being too easy to obtain. For starters, it's very likely that the OP will upvote the answer (unless he/she lacks the rep). It'd even be worse if the OP hasn't judged the answer's quality but just decided to upvote it anyway. I'd at least increase the score to about 3 or 5, which will ensure that other users can have a say. Other than that, I think it's okay. I'm just not sure if this will be implemented, even if many users vote in favor of it.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Right. 3 seems fair enough; looking at the users page it looks like very few users would have earned the silver badge, and about 3 would have the gold one. With the way people vote here, I'm not sure it would be as easy as elsewhere on SE. Also yes it might be easy to answer 200 questions, but very few of us have done that. I think a badge could help, at least would reward those who do participate as much... but then with a vote threshold set too high it would be tied to rep and that would nullify the badge... \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 3:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ Oh yeah, I forgot about the voting thing here. That would make it harder to reach a score of 3 or 5, especially if one's answer is well-researched and tested (I know I have numerous low-score answers meeting that criteria). \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 3:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ Basically the role of the vote threshold is just to factor out bad posts. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 3:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ Right. But I also don't think it's that much different with the "X Answer" badges. For those, each answer with a certain score gives you the badge. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 3:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ Well the difference is that it takes 1 answer wih X votes to earn, that doesn't reward quantity of answers /participation, just how lucky you are to answer [well] a question that happens to get lots of attention. Different I find. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 4:01
  • \$\begingroup\$ True, and it's unfortunate that much of it has a luck factor. Although, the same thing applies to SO, especially with the much larger number of questions. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 4:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ Besides how different is that from implementing an upgraded version of the "Quorum" badge for non-meta participation (and "Quorum" wants a score of 2)? \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 17:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ Not that different, I suppose. I am surprised that Quorum's requirement is this low, though it's still just a bronze badge. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 19:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ It's just that: a badge that's meant to encourage mere participation. I'm suggesting we extend that to CR. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 19:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ Alright. Since you were already told on MSO that this is CR-exclusive, I suppose the mods here have to decide on this. I assume they have power to create new badges, unless that's reserved for SE employees. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jamal
    Commented Oct 10, 2013 at 19:47

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