Timeline for answer to Community Asks Sprint Announcement – January 2026: Custom site-specific badges! by Tinkeringbell
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Post Revisions
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 11 at 14:14 | comment | added | user1937198 | I have no idea how practical this is, but we already have a reasonably strong communities around SEDE. Could we make it so the mods could set up a badge to be awarded based on a query run against side every time its exported? Then the awarding would be impartial, but dev effort would fall on the community. | |
| Jan 7 at 15:30 | comment | added | Spevacus StaffMod | @Tinkeringbell I will see what I can do about auditability. We're trying to utilize the existing badge framework as much as we can here, so we'd need to adjust badge display to account for manually-granted badges and indicate that they were awarded by a moderator. Unfortunately, due to the technical implications involved, we will not be able to associate a particular badge with a particular post. While badges support a "You earned (badge) for (action)" configuration, making this dynamic to support this feature would be a grand undertaking. | |
| Jan 7 at 8:39 | comment | added | SPArcheon | @Spevacus Imho, you are reducing what is a community issue to a personal one. Maybe Tinkeringbell does indeed fear for herself - added work, pestering etc. But the headless robot the company would create wouldn't be just a "Tink problem". Domesticated moderation, double standard, "local culture" idiocy... all problems shog9 knew very well and things that never went away. So... I don't feel the urge to give more bullets to bad actors. Especially since we still can't vote AGAINST a mod despite the many requests. | |
| Jan 7 at 7:49 | comment | added | Tinkeringbell Mod | @Lundin jup. But the post also says: "We don’t believe badges should be limited to just contests, though." Which is what I'm definitely not a fan of. | |
| Jan 7 at 7:40 | comment | added | Lundin | I suppose such badges awarded by mods could work for the sites that run various challenges on their meta. The winner is decided by public voting so that rules out favoritism. | |
| Jan 6 at 20:01 | comment | added | Richard | @JohnOmielan - "“The Council of the Royal Society is a collection of men who elect each other to office and then dine together at the expense of this society to praise each other over wine and give each other medals.” ~ Babbage. | |
| Jan 6 at 19:08 | comment | added | John Omielan | @Spevacus One other related issue to the concerns with accusations of favoritism, especially if the criteria are not completely objective, is if a site moderator, or a community manager, is the recipient. Do you think this is a significant enough concern? If so, do have any plans about how to potentially address this, e.g., perhaps have the option of a relatively independent community manager give the badge instead? | |
| Jan 6 at 17:39 | comment | added | Tinkeringbell Mod | @Spevacus "Further, you'd be under no obligation to award them if you didn't want to." Good thing you'd mentioned this, I was thinking about that. Do CMs have any plans for how to handle it when regular users really want them/want them more and all moderators for a site don't? | |
| Jan 6 at 17:37 | comment | added | Tinkeringbell Mod | @M-- It sure should be auditable. It also shouldn't require a mod more than mere seconds to confirm a badge is actually earned, if it really has to be manual. I don't want to have to spend minutes to trail through e.g. all questions tagged "contest-2026" or from last month to find/confirm that a user wrote three answers with a positive score... | |
| Jan 6 at 17:32 | comment | added | M-- | @Spevacus This is not my preferred implementation. I too share the concerns laid above. However, you could at least put some guardrails around this to make it less controversial. For example, the badges can only be awarded to quantifiable/measurable activities. Let's say Arqade community wants to award a badge to most popular screenshot in the past month; that's fine. One can get the score of posts in a certain period, and audit the badges awarded. But awarding a badge to the person with most downvotes on answers should not be allowed, cause the community cannot verify that. | |
| Jan 6 at 17:30 | comment | added | user400654 | Maybe... the tool that hands these badges out can have some creative ways of filtering/selecting users built-in. Like a button/dropdown/component on posts/answers themselves for meta or site based things like the screenshot contest would make that specific style of custom badge pretty easy to award to users who "earned" them. A pin tool to pin the badge you're working with at the moment to the top of the list so you don't need to look for it every time you reward it, etc | |
| Jan 6 at 17:22 | comment | added | Spevacus StaffMod | While it would be preferable for these badges to be automatically awarded for e.g. event winners, the onus would be on the developers to configure them in a way that allows for this, and that's a big undertaking. Making these manually awarded and putting that power in the hands of moderators is our best stab at an intermediary where CMs can create them quite easily, and mods can dish them out just as easily. | |
| Jan 6 at 17:20 | comment | added | Spevacus StaffMod | This is a fair point of view and one I expected from you when the subject of moderators being able to award early access to privileges came up, where your concern was the same. One thing I will say on this is that, in order for a badge to be added to a site, it'll need to have community buy-in, so you'd have the opportunity to be vocally against badge requests where it seems like you'd be badgered for them. Further, you'd be under no obligation to award them if you didn't want to. | |
| Jan 6 at 17:16 | history | answered | TinkeringbellMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |