Community Asks Sprint Announcement – January 2026: Custom site-specific badges!

What sorts of issues do you have with this idea? What problems do we need to prepare for that you foresee?

The general thoughts that come up with any idea that comes with manually awarding things by moderators: I expect the number of accusations of favoritism or gatekeeping to go up. Also, I expect badgering for badges. I am honestly never a fan of anything that adds more responsibilities to moderators, the system itself should be made accountable for this and not the moderators, in my opinion.

I am thus really not a fan of this idea for anything other than those things that can come with clear, simple rules like all badges have already: "you participated in a contest/placed first in a contest" is not much different from "you did X amount of review tasks/answered Y questions with tag Z in a good way", and it helps a lot to avoid/prevent the whining, drama and badgering that are bound to come with badges for stuff that's fuzzy, and unquantifiable, like "going above and beyond".

And when the rules for a new badge are this simple and quantifiable, the awarding should just be automatic (like the old hats from winterbash), it saves moderators effort and being in the middle of this whole thing. Awarding such things automatically probably already comes with enough issues, like the ones winterbash had with insincere participation that only caused more moderation load, just for the hat...

(My first thoughts were "*groan*, more work", and "I'm going to get accused of favoritism", so basically what Tinkeringbell said, but there's some more points I want to make...)

• Humans have imbalanced skills (e.g. at Chinese.SE, I simply can't judge Cantonese posts with the same competence as Mandarin posts).

• Humans are unable to apply uniform attention to posts, so the posts mods frequent will end up with extra badges.

• It'd be very hard to get this consistent across sites.

I feel like we need to emphasize that we're not under any illusion that these rewards are impartial, even calling them something like "mod's choice". (Also, can mods award themselves badges? Can mods awards other mod badges?)

Maybe there are better choices than (permanent) badges, like bounties or "temporarily pinned posts" or the ability to increase a question's hotness. Also, why mods, and not users with sufficient rep (in a tag)? That seems more "community" to me.

If you want me to publicly click "I'm a mod and I really like this post" every now and then (and some algorithm does something with that knowledge), I could probably do that. But if you want me to conduct some kind of competition for badges, then that's another thing entirely.

One with a practical point: If this goes through, don't forget to update the help center. Currently, /help/what-are-badges states: "They are based on data, rather than being arbitrarily awarded by a human.", which will no longer be true after implementation of this feature.

I wonder if this could be used to promote more activity of specific types on sites that are struggling.

Exactly 10 years ago, there was an initiative that I've always found inspiring: when Mechanics SE was struggling to graduate due to having not enough users with enough rep, other site stats being sufficient, the site's highest-rep user (now a moderator, but not yet one at that point) stepped up with a proposal in order to increase site engagement and voting: for every user earning an Electorate badge that month, he would personally give up 100 reputation in a bounty, assuming the badge earner had a worthy answer to award it on. Long story short, it worked and the site graduated later that year.

I can't find it now in chat transcripts, but I recall that I casually proposed a similar initiative on Literature SE in its beta days, to encourage voting and get more users with rep-based privileges, but the then moderators didn't like the idea and I never formally went ahead with it.

The only problem with what was done on Mechanics SE is that the criteria for the Electorate badge aren't necessarily the best: it's only about voting on questions, but on most SE sites, answers are where the real expertise is and they deserve to be rewarded at least as much as questions. But, what if each site could customise its own activity-based badges according to what sort of activity is needed on the site?

• Not getting enough questions? Create a custom version of the Curious/Inquisitive/Socratic badges! Random idea: "post a question every day for 15 days consecutively"?
• Not getting enough votes? Create a custom version of the Civic Duty/Electorate/Vox Populi badges! Random idea: "vote 100 times on answers"?
• Not getting enough answers? Create a custom badge for posting a lot of well-received answers (for some values of "a lot" and "well-received")!
• Too many old unanswered questions? Create a custom version of the Revival/Necromancer badges! Random idea: "answer 10 unanswered questions with a score of at least 3 on each answer"?

And so on, and so on - you get the point. It could be great if the mod team and/or meta community of a struggling site could get together and say "this is what we need to improve our site's activity, and here's how we can gamify it with badges to reward activity", and then actually start issuing those rewards and hopefully improving activity levels as desired.

What sorts of issues do you have with this idea? What problems do we need to prepare for that you foresee?

Mostly echoing everyone else's concerns about potential avenues for favouritism/abuse ala voting rings etc. But I feel this could be solved fairly easily:

Awarding badges should be subject to a review and approve/reject by a fellow moderator

Certain mod tasks require another moderator to approve (such as changing the Close reasons, redacting revisions etc). Could Badge awards be subject to the same level of scrutiny?

I feel like that would help alleviate some of the raised concerns regarding favouritism - it's not "one" mod handing out awards like candy, it's a process that must involve at least 2 people (perhaps more, on larger sites like Stack Overflow).

If I can make a feature-request, which would also alleviate the potential for badges to be awarded to "mod favourites":

Consider making "Award badges" a tool unlockable by regular community members

While "just for mods" is... fine, I really think some thought should be given to making it a fully fledged non-mod feature, granted through site participation & rep.

Every site is gamified with reputation tiers tied to site privileges. Lately it seems there's a push to remove/reduce the thresholds for participation, while at the same time, new features are just given to mods with little further thought. I think awarding badges is a pretty great case for an unlockable privilege: giving high-rep community members the ability to propose awards for fellow community members.

I'm not saying that users should be able to just hand out badges without oversight: like the mod example I gave above - they should be subject to being approved or denied. A consensus should be reached with many community members voting, the same way close/reopen and delete votes require a consensus (or perhaps one mod, handling it more similar to a flag). Likewise, perhaps the amount of badges one user can propose over a given timeframe is limited, and/or badges can be revoked in situations where they were awarded in bad faith.

I just think that there are regular community members with their finger on the pulse in places that the 3-10 site mods might not be across. Rather than have them put up a whole Meta post requesting the mods award someone a badge for always saying "welcome!" to newbies in the chat, or for chipping away at a thankless retag job over 6 months, give them a way to propose them directly.

What sorts of situations do you think your communities would want to create a badge for?

Broadly speaking? Recognizing Effort. Any of the sorts of situations in which it's obvious that a user is going above and beyond for no reward. Stuff like always being welcoming in the comments on new users' posts, participating in tag reorganisation efforts, editing to update old answers, and so on.

Are there any use-cases you can think of that are exceptional and interesting?

• Mini-mod - Consistently raises thoughtful custom flags
  As an example: we have a few users who do the grunt work of investigating AI cases for us, and supply links and explanations as to why it's thought to be AI-generated, making the mod's job pretty simple. It'd be nice to be able to recognise that in some small fashion
• <Topic> Champion
  In lieu of ever getting something like Collectives on the Network sites - for users who regularly participate in a handful of related tags - answering, editing, closing/reopening, etc, all within a certain topic.
  On a site like Arqade, where every game has it's own tag, it's easy for a long running series (like Pokemon) to have lots of tags with < 200 questions apiece. So a user's tag badge progress displays as low, but their expertise in the area is actually quite high, and should be recognised.

Arqade's Screenshot of the Week (most of these could potentially be automated, if that's an option):

• Screenshot of the Week Winner
• Winning Streak - Something commemorating win streaks?
  • Win SotW 3 times in a row
  • Win SotW 10 times
• People's Champion
  • Get more votes on your submission than the winner, after the competition has already closed
• Screenshot of the week - Organiser
  • Rewarding some of our community members who consistently help run the contests, whether that's handling the posting of the question, updating the Hall of Fame or Topic-collection posts, answering questions/clarifying rules etc

I like the idea of sites being able to customize how they recognize community members. I think giving site-specific “flair” instead of badges might be better so that it doesn’t disrupt existing badges, and there is a distinction between site-specific awards and standard badges.

One of the cool things about this is that there will be achievements that you can only get by participating on a particular site - I think they should be highlighted more than just adding to a badge total on the user card. Winter Bash hats were great because you could change them up to show off different ones.

I know that custom flair is a heavier lift than additional badges, but I think it would be more effective, and hopefully the code for the winter bash hats can be repurposed so you aren’t starting from scratch.

• It side-steps issues with mixing badges that can be earned on any site with badges awarded on one site by moderators.
• It gives site-specific awards more visibility across the network.
• It lets people “rep” their site and maybe generate more interest in it.

I can imagine something like everyone with 2K+ reputation getting site flair and having events where members are asked to display it for a particular week to raise awareness of the site.

Automation

Please make it possible to award these through:

1. a place where one may paste a SEDE query (it doesn't have to be a complicated page, it would be up to the mod to write and validate the query using SEDE directly) that returns the users that should be granted the badge and how many times. Specify a format and it'll be up to us to write valid queries. Run the query [ weekly | daily | monthly ] and award based on the results.
2. The stack exchange API. create an endpoint and allow mod accounts to hit it to award a specific badge to a specific user. It would then be up to the mods or the community to run a script that decides when to grant a badge.

This is an obvious upgrade to the proposed "add something else for the mods to do" and it allows for the creation of objective badges. Having both would allow non-technical users to re-use SEDE queries shared by moderators of other sites, without needing to learn hosting, running scripts or what an API is, while allowing technical users to surpass the limitations of SEDE queries if they desire, at their own costs.

I am mostly ambivalent about the subject of this sprint--it's nice, but not something that I think will substantively move the needle on any pain points across the network. It will be good for smaller sites with active moderator teams that don't already have an overwhelming amount of work, I suspect.

Since you're on the subject of working with badges, can we please remove the Constable (Served as a pro-tem moderator for at least 1 year or through site graduation) and Precognitive (Followed the Area 51 proposal for this site before it entered the commitment phase) badges from Stack Overflow, or at least move them to Retired? These badge have never been awarded and will never be awarded because their conditions can never be met. There are other such badges on other sites that I'm sure those communities would appreciate being updated (arguably I think the Beta tag should also be retired on SO, because it was last achievable roughly 18 years ago). I suspect doing this would be a 2-minute task per site for any site that has badges which need to be retired.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to request that for future sprints the team moves back to the format of "ask the community for suggestions on bugs or feature requests to choose from" for the Community Asks Sprints. While it's true that this topic was technically asked for by the community, it was requested well over a decade ago, and I have to wonder whether, given the chance, the community would weigh it strongly today vs. other things like more controls in chat or for moderator tooling or tag hierarchies/parent tags or answer versioning or a non-rep-based privileges system, etc.

I believe this will be momentarily fun and then it'll lapse into something nobody cares about, similar to seasonal hats/flairs or what badges are already among the longer-term/active users (I got another badge? That's nice... click). On a service that purports to provide quality solutions to specific problems it's playful at best.

If you have the time to develop this, couldn't you rather take the time to make all of the vote-to-close reasons site-optional? Over at worldbuilding, we'd give our collective left pinky toes to be rid of the "Opinion-Based" close reason. It has caused us and continues to cause us no end of grief (what does "too opinion-based" mean for a question asking for help developing a superpower?). That would actually help where I can see no long-term benefit to community-specific badges.

Or bring back and improve community advertising. We saw a HUGE drop in Meta participation after the community ads were discontinued. The various highlight links in the right column are in no way equal to community ads for drawing attention. They're just more text on an already text-heavy web page.

Community badges? Not valuable.

One use case where site-specific badges seem especially appropriate is one-off historical recognition, where the badge acknowledges a verifiable fact rather than an ongoing or subjective contribution.

For example, a badge like “Community Founder” could be awarded once to a person who founded an independent community that later became the basis for a Stack Exchange site.

On Stack Overflow на русском, such a case exists: the community originated from HashCode.ru, an independent Russian-language Q&A platform created by Nicolas Chabanovsky, which later evolved into the current Stack Exchange site.

Beyond documenting the site’s origin, this also reflects a broader impact of such efforts: making it possible for large language-specific communities to discuss programming concepts in their native language, lowering the barrier to participation.

This kind of badge would:

• be non-competitive and non-repeatable,
• avoid subjectivity or favoritism,
• clearly document the site’s history rather than reward ongoing activity.

In that sense, it fits well with the concerns raised here about transparency, moderation load, and avoiding arbitrary recognition, while still allowing communities to acknowledge important historical milestones.

I'd like to award a badge to certain questions which warrant being included in the Hot Network Questions list. However a precursor to being able to do that is for mods to be notified whenever a question is put on the list. Please implement that first.

This sounds like a fun idea in theory, but I can see it creating extra work for moderators and potential fairness issues if it’s based on subjective impressions. I think it could work well for clear, well-defined community events, but it might need careful oversight to avoid cliques or confusion.

a great alternative for rewarding participants of community events.

Sounds like wishful thinking. There are enough badges to engage users and creating more custom-per-site-per-event-badges seems not only confusing but it also seems arbitrary. I can remember plenty of engaged users that at one point became unbearably obnoxious towards other specific users just because they felt they could get away with it (and they had groomed their own little fan club). Singling users out for specific awards risks exacerbating every social mistake they did on the network only to engage them further at the cost of aggravating who they might have wronged, there's a 1 to N relationship against and only a 1 to 1 relationship in favor. The proposal doesn't raise any of the hard issues like internet addiction, I've often wondered how healthy the participation of many users really is when they start having periodic or sporadic meltdowns.

The moderator selects which badge to award from the list of custom badges.

It would be more productive to carefully examine complaints about moderation. Or the prevalence of local taboos like the censorship against any use of the word toxic applied to the sites. The last few valid questions I asked had immediate closure and down votes, going on to be successful nevertheless but only after a round of significant arguing. One of the common arguments against the Qs was: "Doesn't show enough research", but that's an old SO habit that's been proven wrong several times over. It is still, a common problem across the network that perfectly good questions are invalidated by users demanding that Qs be essays, I won't bother searching for counter-argument canonical posts because, well, I haven't seen staff do any real effort that way either. (If you haven't notice the irony let me point it out to you: this is precisely at the moment the site suffers a Q crisis, yet one of the most common difficulties/misconceptions with asking Qs that's so often been pointed out continues being ignored.)

The bottom line is that problems that are common with the local culture of the SE network (and are among the most serious and often denounced) aren't addressed (for +10 years) and instead we get nonsense proposals like the one Spevacus just posted - which is nonsense for several reasons, like the proposed gamification getting mixed with additional distinction and further mod discretionary arbitrariness. There's an obvious censorship effect that stops everyone from addressing the obvious problems.

We’re excited to start on this idea

I am, instead, flabbergasted of dismal.