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Arqade’s uniquely qualified for a recently-released feature of ours: Community Badges. These custom badges are quite useful for rewarding, as an example, winners of community-run events. Despite your Screenshot of the Week event being a slam-dunk opportunity that you’ve already targeted (awesome, by the way!), we’d also like to explore what other badge ideas might benefit your site.

For a quick reminder on what these badges are, Community Badges are a special type of badge that moderators can award manually. New ones can be created via proposals on your meta site. Once they’ve reached a consensus on how a badge should look, the Community team can add the badge and the site’s moderators can begin awarding it. While we wrote a FAQ post on these badges that details the following in grander detail, I’d like to mention the fields that must be filled in for a proposal.

  1. Badge Name (25 characters): The name of the badge. Should be short and ideally self-explanatory.
  2. Badge Class (Bronze, Silver, Gold): Specify the class for the badge. Remember that gold badges should be fairly rare!
  3. Badge Description (200 characters): The badge’s description, which should detail the criteria to earn the badge. Links are supported, so link to meta posts if relevant!
  4. Can it be awarded multiple times? (Yes or No): Default to yes, but this is an option we can control if desired.
  5. Criteria to earn: We should clearly define how a user would qualify to earn the badge. This can be subjective or objective, so long as it serves the community justly. Think it through carefully, but don’t let yourself be paralyzed or overwhelmed here. Badges are meant to be fun!

These badges present a unique opportunity to potentially garner engagement in areas you think users should participate in a bit more. If you think it’s sustainable as a badge, and that moderators would be comfortable awarding them in certain scenarios, then it can fit as a Community Badge!

An unpolished idea that I have as an Arqade user is that this site has a sizable amount of old and outdated content, some of which should probably be replaced with fully up-to-date Q&A pairs. If we formulated a badge for users who show interest in doing this, we could incentivize improving the knowledge base here and replace or improve some old and unloved content.

Leave any ideas for new Community Badges on Arqade you may have below as answers. Don’t be afraid to throw out a half-baked idea if you think it can be polished into something great. If you have any questions for us, we’d also be happy to answer them. I, personally, will be available in The Bridge if you want to chat there!

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    Are these badges awarded manually or procedurally? Commented Jan 28 at 9:03
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    @pinckerman Spevacus has all but confirmed no automation will be possible at all beyond building a list and having a mod go through the list Commented Jan 28 at 10:53
  • @Spevacus Can we insert custom terms into a pre-defined custom badge? Thinking similar to how tag badges work. One of my example custom badges on the MSE post was for a "<Topic> Champion" - someone who participates in a topic area (higher level than a single tag, similar to SO's "Collectives"). So we could have an "X Champion" badge, then when awarding it we could fill out the X to be "Pokemon Champion", "Minecraft Champion", "Call of Duty Champion" etc etc. Or must each tag be proposed and created standalone? (I assume it's probably the latter but it's worth bringing up imo) Commented Jan 28 at 12:19
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    @Robotnik The latter, I'm afraid. We can't make these as dynamic as you'd want. Commented Jan 28 at 15:48
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    @Spevacus what do you mean a crazy new feature built in 2 weeks on the back of coffee and energy drinks doesn't have all the features I want?!? :P - No worries, I thought as much :) Commented Jan 28 at 22:57
  • Is it possible to have dynamic badge names? To have a badge name based on the activity around a specific topic? (I'm thinking about the Monthly Topic Challenge, but also would like to see user Perry be properly ('pppery'?) awarded for their tremendous work on hunting down and closing Minecraft duplicates.) Commented 2 days ago
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    @Joachim Unfortunately no. We'd have to manually create a badge for each topic. That said, a more general "Monthly Topic"-related event winner/participant badge is quite doable, and one could link the time one was granted a badge to what the topic was on that date manually, but that's a bit of a stretch I imagine. Commented 2 days ago

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I suggest that we have a badge for participating in community events. Recently, I have been running Archipelago events (signups are open for the third one), and it would be nice to have a badge to increase awareness of the events and encourage participation. I think this should exclude Screenshot of the Week, because we already have a separate proposal covering that, and it would probably overshadow other events.

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  • Today, I got a badge for participating in the [community-event] tag (presumably from accumulated votes on SotW). How would your suggestion be different to this? (other that just excluding SotW) Commented 2 hours ago
  • I'm not talking about getting votes on posts in the community-event tag, I'm talking about actual participation in the events themselves. For example, 5 people participated in the last community Archipelago event. They didn't make any posts or get any votes, they participated by playing the games. Commented 2 hours ago
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Related to my other answer, I suggest that we add a badge for organizing community events. If we want to have community events, it would help to have these minor rewards to encourage someone to do the work of organizing them. I admit that this is self-serving: I have recently organized community events, and I would like a badge.

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  • So are you saying have a generic "Event Organiser" badge, or ones specific to the sort of event? "Archipelago Organiser" "Screenshot Organiser", etc Commented Jan 27 at 23:52
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    I was thinking of a generic badge, but I don't have a strong opinion about doing it one way or the other. Commented Jan 28 at 0:40
  • A badge for each event organised? Or just for organising events in general, with tiers for more events (eg 1 is bronze, 5 is silver, 15 is gold)? Commented Jan 28 at 1:58
  • I was thinking that it would be a repeatedly awardable badge, with one instance awarded per event. But again, I think either way would work fine. Commented Jan 28 at 2:48
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Here's some fleshed out SotW badge ideas:

Screenshot of the Week Winner

Currently being discussed separately.

Looks like we might be aiming for Bronze, Silver and Gold variants based on the amount of times a user has won.

Badge: The Screenshot we deserve

Class: Silver
Description: Received more votes on your submission than the winner of the competition on Arqade Meta, after the competition had already closed.
Multiple: Yes
Criteria: A Screenshot competition is closed and a winner is chosen. At any point, if another submission passes the threshold of upvotes to become the top voted submission, it is eligible to earn this badge. (Like the competition proper, downvotes are not considered for the calculation)

Badge: Screenshot Comp Organiser

Class: Gold
Description: A recognised organiser of the competition on Arqade Meta
Multiple: No
Criteria: (Subjective). This will be manually awarded to reward some of our community members who consistently help run the contests in any way shape or form. Some examples of tasks that may make you elligible:

  • closing previous competitions & posting the new questions
  • updating the Hall of Fame or Theme-collection posts
  • answering questions/clarifying rules in the comments
  • Helping maintain the SotW tools/templates/scripting/SEDE queries, etc
  • Promoting the competition in chat (or on a main site question: "Cool screenshot, you should submit it for the screenshot competition!" etc)

Users can be nominated to earn this badge. (Nominate via Meta question, use a tag like ). That way, nominations can be voted on and it doesn't end up being a "mod favourite" badge.

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    organizer is an alright name but repechage should be workshopped IMO. maybe something like People's champion or late bloomer? Commented Jan 28 at 10:42
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    @Themoonisacheese yeah my original name for the idea was People's Champion but as it wasn't specific to SotW I tried to rework it. "The Screenshot we deserve"? Commented Jan 28 at 12:05
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    'The Screenshot we deserve' may be hard to keep track of and possibly abused, and if we plan to backfill it be nightmare I feel like Commented Jan 28 at 14:30
  • @TimmyJim - Ultimately, it will only work if we can SEDE query it. If we can get a query that lists answers that are voted higher than the accepted answer, that should work? Commented Jan 28 at 22:44
  • That is probably doable in a query @Robotnik Commented 2 days ago
  • @TimmyJim maybe we can just check the votes once, like 6 months lates, and never rollback it if things change. Commented yesterday
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What about a badge when one of your suggested themes gets used?

Exthemeist

Class: Bronze
Description: One of your suggested themes was used as a SOTW
Multiple: no

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Not sure about this one, maybe we don't want it (in which case feel free to downvote, this is meta) but i think it could possibly be nice

Photographer

Class: Bronze
Description: participate in SOTW five times
Multiple: no

I'd like participation to be rewarded as well. I don't think it's worth it to create higher tiers of it, because very frequent participation should eventually be rewarded by winning the event, but it'd be nice to give something back to the other people making the competition, well, a competition. Ideally, a user that participates 5 times makes it a habit to come back and participate again.

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    I like this, maybe as a one-off badge, rather than "every 5 competitions everyone gets this badge" Commented Jan 28 at 12:09
  • I think this might be a bit too much work to manage, and easy get overlooked. They would have to keep a list of everyone who ever participated and add everyone on to it after every competetion. Commented Jan 28 at 13:55
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    @TreeSpawned that's fair enough, though this is easily managed by a simple SEDE query for "how many times /5 has anyone ever answered a question on meta with the title "..."" Commented Jan 28 at 14:07
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    data.stackexchange.com/meta.gaming/query/1934630/… This query makes it pretty easy to track. Only slightly tricky part would be knowing who already has the badge. Since I think the badges will be awarded on the main site, we can't join in any user badge info to determine who already has the badge. Commented Jan 28 at 14:25
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    @Themoonisacheese 'with the title "..."' AND tagged with [screenshot-of-the-week] Commented Jan 28 at 23:00
  • @TimmyJim sigh, time for me to track down that mess of a SEDE query that allows cross-site queries Commented Jan 28 at 23:01
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    @TimmyJim One query to rule them all. We can probably do a cut down version of this that only gets Arqade and Arqade Meta. Not trivial, but a nice challenge for someone potentially looking to earn a Screenshot Organiser badge perhaps? 🤔🤔🤔 Commented Jan 28 at 23:04
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    @Robotnik wow didn't think cross site queries were a thing. We are going to have a lot of these aren't we :D SOTW getting a lot of community badge attention Commented 2 days ago
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Since we all love our weird and misleading questions that end up in Hot Network Questions, what about awarding the iconic ones?

Hot Asker

Class: Silver
Description: Awarded for extremely well-received and iconic questions
Multiple: yes

This probably needs a threshold on upvotes and views, too.

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  • i understand why but doesn't this overlap with the vanilla badges for "get views" and "get upvotes"? Commented yesterday
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    @Themoonisacheese Yes, and I agree with the views, but our site generates few upvotes even for very good questions, the golden badge for 100 points was awarded only 72 times in, like, 14 years? Commented yesterday
  • i guess that's fair. i'm a tad worried this would incentivize deliberately writing confusing titles for when they should up in HNQ, but that concern is most likely misplaced. Commented yesterday
  • @Themoonisacheese we can always remove the funny title part, btw I feel that random people don't get encouraged by a new badge. What makes HNQ so good is that they are absurd if taken out of context, not just confusing. Commented yesterday
  • The description seems a bit vague... ie what defines well received or iconic? Commented yesterday
  • @voided yep, that's why I wrote we need to define a threshold for upvotes/views/answers... Commented yesterday
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Awaiting the disambiguation of having dynamic badge names, I'd like to propose a static one:

Arqivist

Class: bronze/silver/gold
Description: This user's activity in a Monthly Topic Challenge was upvoted the most (<5 times|15 times>).
Multiple: no, except for gold

Since we soon will start with Robotnik's suggestion to revivify the Monthly Topic Challenge, this might be a nice carrot.
The name is suggestive of the nature of the challenge, the activity of which will be the cultivation and improvement of the quality of our arqive of video game knowledge.

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