What are Community Badges?

What are these badges?

These manually-awarded badges are called “Community Badges”, and they were introduced as a result of a Community Asks sprint in January 2026. These are a unique type of badge, as all sites on the Stack Exchange network can have their own set of Community Badges, each with their own requirements to be earned.

How can I earn a Community Badge?

Community Badges are awarded manually by a site’s moderators, based on defined criteria.

How are Community Badges created on a site?

New Community Badges can be proposed by any user on a site’s meta. They can be created by a Community Manager when the community has shown consensus via score and feedback on a proposal that a badge should be created.

To create a new Community Badge, the community should come together on their meta site and follow a three-step workflow:

Step 1: Propose and Refine

For this step, any community member can create a new meta post and propose the badge. To do so, you should ensure the following portions for a badge proposal are adequately defined:

1. Badge Name (25 characters): This should be a descriptive, and maybe even fun, name for the badge.
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): This should explain how the badge is acquired.
4. Awardable Multiple Times? (Yes or No): You should indicate whether this badge can be awarded multiple times. Most of the time, you should default to “Yes”.
5. Criteria to Earn: You should explain how a user would earn this badge. These can be as objective or subjective as you feel is appropriate for your community.

This is the time for the community to come together and refine the proposal to be well-defined and beneficial to the community. Further, moderators should weigh in on the badge’s suitability as they will be the ones awarding it.

When the community is in agreement that a badge should be created and is well-defined, you can move to Step 2.

Step 2: Escalate

A moderator can retag the meta discussion with status-review. This will add it to the Community department’s ticket backlog and will be prioritized. A Community Manager will review the request and ensure the badge is a suitable addition. If there are any questions or issues with the request, the Community Manager will reach out to that site’s moderators to clarify.

Once the request has been reviewed and approved, the Community Manager will add the badge to the list of Community Badges for the site, and it will be available to be awarded by that site’s moderators.

Step 3: Utilize

Now that the badge is available, moderators should feel free to award it where appropriate. To do so, moderators can navigate to a user’s profile dashboard, and on the left-bar there will be an “Actions” menu. Beneath it is the option to “award community badge”. Clicking it will open a moderator-only form that allows them to choose a badge to be awarded and a button to grant it.