We un-gamified flagging too early by cutting off the gamified incentive after the first 500 flags; we need to provide more incentive. Let’s encourage more participation in policing the seemingly unstoppable flood of AI-generated plagiarism posted all over the network, especially but not uniquely on Stack Overflow. This would also help with fighting spam.
We should therefore have the system re-award another Marshal badge for every 500 helpful flags, not just for the first batch of 500 alone.
Culpa mea
I initially wrote:
For a brief period seven years ago, Marshal badges were awarded over and over again, once per 500 helpful flags. Unfortunately this accidental feature was an unintended one rather than one made after due consideration of a feature request, and so the code that let it happen was "fixed".
In a comment, animuson kindly corrected my misunderstanding of the previous incident:
Just as a note: the issue you cited has absolutely nothing to do with this. The bug was not that it was awarding badges for each 500 flags. The bug was that the query was not detecting users already had the badge and re-awarding it to them. Every user eligible for the badge was receiving duplicates regardless of flag count.
Sorry about that. I still think we should re-award the Marshal badge for each successive 500 helpful flags earned.