A new, harder type of badge

Question

I am proposing that there be a new type of badge: Sapphire. The description could read something like this

Sapphire badges are for the insanely dedicated users of the Stack Exchange. These are near impossible to receive.

You would know that if you saw one of these on a person's profile, they mean business. This would also give those users that seem to have every badge a new chance to prove themselves.

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Here is a possible list of badges. Under the "New" category, I put down badges that aren't similar to any previous badges

Question Badges

• Need a Name - Question favorited by 300 users
• Remarkable Question - Question score of 300 or more
• Rock Star Question - Asked a question with 30,000 views

New

• Confused - Be on the top 10 question list of a tag for 1 year

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Answer Badges

• Remarkable Answer - Answer score of 300 or more
• Merry go Round - Provided answer of +30 score to a question of -7 score
• Underdog - Zero score accepted answers: more than 50 and 50% of total

New

• Clean Sweep - 90% Accepted Answer ratio for a month, with at least 50 Answers
• Know it all - Be on the top 10 answer list of a tag for 1 year

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Tag Badges

• Sapphire Badge Total score of 3000 in at least 400 non-community wiki answers.

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Moderation Badges

• Bailiff - Completed at least 3,000 review tasks. This badge is awarded once per review type
• Master - Raised 1000 helpful flags
• Clean Freak - 12,000 edits (number so high to accommodate for tiny 1 letter changes)
• Constituent - Voted on 1800 posts and 25% or more of total votes are on questions

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Other

• Need a Name - Shared a link to a question that was visited by 3000 unique IP addresses
• Dedicated - Gained 200 rep on 300 days

New

• Supernatural - Gained 300 rep on one day
• Ungodly - Gained 300 rep on 10 days
• Hacker - Responsibly disclosed a security flaw in Stack Exchange
• Lawmaker - Had been a moderator

Note 1: The badge names are just an example, along with the requirements. I just wrote it up quick to give an example.

Note 2: There is no correlation to the number 3. It is just a random number.

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It has been brought up that Platinum Badges is quite similar. However it is

1. Quite old
2. A discussion question
3. Not specific

However these reasons alone aren't enough to prevent duplicate closing. This question was referring to rewarding people with new badges for something they don't really have control over, such as views and upvotes. Many of these new badges require a lot of work from the person hoping to achieve them.

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It has been brought up that these requirements would be near impossible for all sites besides stack overflow. These aren't supposed to be too easy. Even though there is the joy of knowing you helped someone, it also adds to your reliability as an answerer. A solution would be to make them harder to obtain on Stack Overflow, because the community is so big. None of the sites will ever be as big as SO, so I think that is a valid solution.

Answer 1

The purpose of badges it to reward behavior that is desirable, to be something to strive for that at the same time causes good actions and/or learning the system along the way.

What purpose would platinum badges serve? They're almost all exclusive to Stack Overflow by sheer counts, and most serve only to reward the very, very top users. As a developer: we have enough trouble with Skeet's badge count overflowing the user card space, adding a badge level isn't going to help.

On pretty much every site besides Stack Overflow, they would never be awarded - making the problem of the gold badge counts (many of which are already unattainable in small communities) even worse.

The other badges, being in the top n users for x time period would be fine as gold badges...if they were technically possible. Unfortunately, they aren't without a significant addition to or data logging and a hugely expensive query to check that data (users x badges is a huge dataset).

Keep in mind I'm saying this as being one of the very few users that would earn any of these.

Oh yeah, one more thing...who said the Hacker badge doesn't already exist?

Answer 2

May I make an alternative suggestion? Informally implement challenge badges yourself on a site’s meta. You don’t need Stack Exchange to implement this, so it won’t require going through the long process towards implementation: you can do it today.

Make a meta post and set a challenge for the site. Whoever wins, you give them a challenge badge (perhaps some nice image; maybe even add the winner’s name to the image to immortalize the win).

One constructive criticism: challenges where it’s “do something X times” are fairly unexciting, and even moreso when there’s already a challenge “do that thing X/3 times”. You’re more likely to get participation with more imaginative quests.

E.g.:

• The “Augean Stable” badge for whoever makes a long-term dysfunctional tag useful again.

• On some language sites, there’s “translation golf” where the goal is to translate some fixed snippet succinctly yet faithfully.

These imaginative challenges are fun! But harder to concoct.