Implement secret badges

Question

After watching the flurry of activity, and people (i.e. myself) trying to do a lot of stuff to try and get some of the secret hats, I realized that it might be worthwhile for SE to give out secret badges.

Some criteria and specs:

• more work than gold ones of the same type
• shown with some special symbology next to the gold in the top bar
• did I mention secret, i.e. you won't know until you get one

So you could do one for five thousand edits, one hundred upvoted comments, 1000 point questions, or whatever. If you can think up a bunch of secret hats, then you can probably come up with a bunch of secret badges. Go Wild!

Answer 1

This is something that we're actively considering (in fact, it came up quite long before this year's Winter Bash). It would definitely serve to reward people that do what's needed to get the gold badges, and keep going.

The 'secretness' of them solves the problem of implementing badges with higher criteria than gold, we don't publicly set very high goals that are likely not attainable by the vast majority of users.

I'm not sure of the timeline here, but this is something that's been / being discussed.

Note - regarding concerns of these being gamed, it would be impossible unless if by gaming you mean doing whatever the badge implies consistently right over a long period of time. You wouldn't get something for reviewing 5k things, you'd get something for reviewing 5k things with n or fewer review bans in the last y (time). I realize guards need to be around this.

Answer 2

Secret badges? Sign me up! :)

However, my take on it would be slightly different. Don't get me wrong, badges are cool and all. But another badge is just another number somewhere in a profile summary.

What users want are gravatar modifiers. That is the truly awesome spectacle of the hats. And the hats are awesome.

I would suggest that these secret badges, instead of being epicly hard to achieve and requiring a ton of time, are temporary. Temporary being in the time frame of 6 to 8 weeks (2 months, 6 possible per year). This time frame would allow for time to consider the next one.

Every 2 months (6 times a year) offer a secret achievement. This could carry a badge earning if you wished. Perhaps a silver badge that could be earned multiple times.

The achievement would vary, and so would the reward. The reward would be a gravatar modifier of some sort. However, at the end of the current achievement period (every two months), the modifier would be gone, and the only way to get the next one would be to complete the achievement.

The benefit from constantly coming up with new or different achievements would allow the SE staff to direct user traffic to the most needed parts of the exchange. And also, users would love being able to get a gravatar modifier.

They would have to be rather exceptional though. Such as hitting the review cap 10 days in a row.

Answer 3

There could even be a fun side, neither good nor bad. A few examples:

• Refresher Badge - someone who refreshes a single page more than 20 times without browsing other parts of the site.

• Narcissist - someone who after x amount of time being on the site has only looked at their own posts.

• Camper - someone who leaves their window open on a single page for more than 24 hours.

• The One - someone who has exponentially more quote code in their posts than non-quoted words.

Etc.

Answer 4

I think that this could be a good idea, and it could work. Perhaps a badge beyond gold for some categories, as you mentioned, 1000 point questions or something like that?

However, you've seen how long most of the secret hats have remained "secret", and I think secret badges would be even more easily exposed than hats.

But, while a lot of hats have encouraged good behavior, I believe that I've also seen some hats encourage discouraged behavior, mainly robo-reviewing and robo-voting. If there were to be a titanium (or rhodium, or whatever) badge, it would have to be for things that would be very hard to abuse, such as upvotes received, or # of quality flags and edits.

Answer 5

This idea is patently silly.

As soon as secret badges are up, questions on meta will pop up asking how to obtain them; people will start tracking them through Data Explorer or extensions or whatnot like they always have and "conspire" to get them; it will become yet another hoop to jump through, ruining the whole point of "secretness".

That is, unless your secret badges are so outlandish that nobody on Stack Overflow already qualifies for them — therefore making them clinically insane.

I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't see the appeal of this one.

Answer 6

I think one badge that might be interesting is something like the Mortarboard/Epic/Legendary badges, but it counts rep over the rep cap, i.e. it looks at how much rep you could have got if you hadn't have hit the rep cap.

Answer 7

I like the idea of having secret badges. A way that I thought to make much more difficult for people to deduce them, is having one designated day a week for giving these badges.

For example, when a User qualifies to get a secret badge he gets it, but its hidden. And every Monday, all hidden badges are unhidden (:p) thus making much more difficult for a user to know how he got them. A lot of stuff probably happened that week in his/her account. And if it didn't, then he/she is not an active user and probably won't get any secret badges anyways.