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Consider the following situation: A user is a member for approximately two years. During this period his/her reputation gain was slowly, but steadily increasing: a few votes per week.

Suddenly within a few days, each of his posts was upvotes exactly once. As a consequence voting was reversed, one unknown user removed and the user in question earned a 10-day suspension. It sounds like the system works!

BUT: During this strange event the user reached 200 daily rep for the first time and earned the mortarboard badge - after the suspension he/she still has this badge.

How can this be? If this is status by design, does this mean one can just accept a 10-day suspension and get this badge for free?

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2 Answers 2

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Because there is little to no point in retracting a bronze badge.

All of the bronze badges are designed to be teaching tools that introduce users to the various features of the site. They are completely useless in all other regards, and they don't provide any reputation or additional privileges. Retracting the badge itself achieves nothing. It's just extra work for the system for the sake of doing extra work.

In that regard, whether obtained via voting fraud or not, the user was introduced to the reputation cap and how the system works when you reach 200 reputation in a single day. And in this case, they were also introduced to the downsides and consequences of going about things the wrong way.

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The answer https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/126363 suggests that badges acquired by fraud will be reverted.

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    the current top answer is more recent and (also) answered by an SE employee. Bronze badges will not be reverted.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jul 11, 2018 at 21:07
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    Sometimes we will revoke gold badges acquired by unsavory means, if we care enough to do it. But it's pretty rare that users get gold badges through abuse. We would never bother revoking a bronze badge.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Jul 12, 2018 at 7:01

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