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Is there a way to view your own progress towards certain badges? For example:

  • Tumbleweed - What value constitutes low views for a week?
  • Fanatic – Is there a way to view how many days in a row you currently have?
  • Beta – Is it even possible to get this badge anymore?
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14 Answers 14

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Note: queries use data which may be several days old. Find out when the last update was here.

Question Badges

Answer Badges

Voting Badges

  • Using All Votes: Suffrage, Vox Populi: hover over your username in the site header; the number of votes you have cast today is shown
  • Total Votes: Civic Duty, Electorate: see profile > votes > all
  • Sportsmanship: You cannot track progress, but you can find competing answers to upvote

Editing Badges

Moderation Badges

Miscellaneous Badges

  • Reputation Cap: Mortarboard, Epic, Legendary: go to https://stackoverflow.com/reputation and scroll to the end to see how many times you've hit the daily reputation cap.
  • Comments: progress towards Commentator, Pundit
  • Chat: Talkative, Outspoken: it is not possible to track progress towards these badges
  • Consecutive Visits: Enthusiast, Fanatic: on your profile page is a field named visited which will show something like "278 days, 11 consecutive"
  • Site Promotion: Announcer, Booster, Publicist: it is not possible to track progress towards these badges
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  • The SEDE query for Guru Progress is error'd. I checked it against my answers and the SEDE query results actually miss at least one answer (this one)
    – inspectorG4dget
    Commented Oct 14, 2012 at 15:59
  • @inspectorG4dget That question doesn't seem to be present in the data dump anywhere even though it appears old enough that it should be.
    – Brad Mace
    Commented Oct 14, 2012 at 17:13
  • Those queries are very useful and work well but what they show seems to be always a few days old. My recent scores, for example, are not taken into account.
    – Szymon
    Commented Sep 28, 2013 at 21:55
  • +1 just for the "learn more" hint for topic tag progress -- I would never have found it. Clicking the "more info" link under "Top Answerers" reveals much more.
    – tripleee
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 18:07
  • 1
    The instructions under Using All Votes no longer work; however, you can go to e.g. stackoverflow.com/review/close (or any other review queue, whether or not you have the privilege to review in it) and hovering over the progress bar in the subheader until the number of votes for Civic Duty shows up. Record this at the beginning of a UTC day, and then refer back at intervals to see how many more you have. Unfortunately, it seems to lag quite a bit, perhaps an hour or two.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Commented Jan 14, 2015 at 6:47
  • 4
    why it's not possible to track progresss of Announcer?
    – Tarik
    Commented Feb 15, 2015 at 23:15
  • Great list, most of these queries are still good. The Reviewing link however is dead.
    – crthompson
    Commented Apr 22, 2015 at 16:30
  • What about Tag Badges?
    – Qwerty
    Commented Nov 11, 2019 at 15:35
104

To get the Beta badge, I suggest finding an SQL injection vulnerability.

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  • 7
    Investigating...
    – SwDevMan81
    Commented Jul 8, 2009 at 0:22
  • 20
    Actually, that would likely get you the Hacker badge, not Beta.
    – Dinah
    Commented Aug 16, 2009 at 21:43
  • 34
    Dinah: I don't think you quite follow.
    – Tom Hawtin - tackline
    Commented Aug 21, 2009 at 22:55
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    I found it! I gave myself the beta badge. But I felt bad about it since I don't like to cheat. So I used the same injection and removed the badge again.
    – jgauffin
    Commented Jun 10, 2011 at 8:40
  • 4
    Yeah, in beta software there are SQL injection vulns...
    – H2CO3
    Commented Aug 15, 2012 at 21:14
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There is no centralized location or mechanism for checking badge progress. However, you can figure out your progress for some badges with a little legwork.

  • Strunk & White/Copy Editor
  • Visit the /review page and check the sidebar
  • Enthusiast/Fanatic
  • Check the "Consecutive days" counter in your user profile
  • Clicking the consecutive days text brings up a calendar of exactly which days you visited, which can be helpful for checking on the current day
  • Electorate
  • Visit the /review page and check the sidebar
  • For a simple explanation of the rules, see this answer
  • Epic/Legendary
  • Check the list at the bottom of the /reputation page
  • Deputy/Marshal
  • Check your flag weight in your user profile
  • Reviewer
  • Visit the /review page and check the sidebar
  • Pundit
  • Use this SEDE query and plug in your own user ID
  • Research Assistant
  • Visit any tag wiki and check the sidebar
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32

The uservoice request for badge progress was declined with the following comment from Jeff:

this is modelled on the xbox live achievements model, and that does not show progress, either.. by design

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  • 93
    BTW, better games (Orange box, for example) do show achievement progress. It becomes a standard, new games do it more and more often.
    – buti-oxa
    Commented Aug 30, 2009 at 19:10
  • 4
    Steam achievements are great for the opposite reason, I always wanted a combination of Steam achievements and Microsoft's overall Gamerscore. Maybe you could add some features for those tricky badges to spurn me on, whilst still retaining the psychology of the thing?
    – Marcus Whybrow
    Commented Jan 7, 2011 at 9:41
  • 50
    I don't want to be negative, but Jeff saying that "We don't because others don't" surprises me. After all SO has been innovating the ground in Q&A websites for some times now.... Why this conservative approach?
    – user138932
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 11:23
  • I do agree with you.
    – Adam Arold
    Commented Jul 24, 2012 at 15:38
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No. They are meant to be mysterious by design.

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  • I can't seem to find the reference to when/where Jeff said this, but he did. It's supposed to be a surprise when you get most badges.
    – Rob Allen
    Commented Jul 7, 2009 at 16:18
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    Does this mean Jeff sits at home and looks at questions to determine who gets badges? There must be some metric to determine it automatically like all the rest.
    – SwDevMan81
    Commented Jul 8, 2009 at 0:19
  • @sw: Those 'metrics' are here: meta.stackoverflow.com/badges
    – GEOCHET
    Commented Jul 8, 2009 at 0:20
  • I see a bunch of badges
    – SwDevMan81
    Commented Jul 8, 2009 at 3:31
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    @Sw: But you cannot see the reasons you get them right next to them?
    – GEOCHET
    Commented Jul 8, 2009 at 11:03
  • I see the descriptions, but for the mentioned Badges in the question...
    – SwDevMan81
    Commented Jul 9, 2009 at 11:41
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I'm marking this status-completed, since for a handful of badges it is implemented:

review badge progress

There are a few others like this - Fanatic progress shows up on your user profile, Research Assistant on tag wiki pages, etc.

That said, I don't see it ever being implemented across the board - consider a badge like Unsung Hero, where you might well qualify for long enough to earn the badge, only to finally collect some up-votes on those answers. Even badges like Tumbleweed are problematic, since you might easily be 90% of the way there only to gain a few votes or attract a few views and suddenly be back at 0%.

In the end, not all badges are equal; some are milestones you might strive to reach, others are consolation prizes or recognition for truly exceptional efforts, contributions, or plain old good fortune. Displaying progress where there's something you should strive to progress in is great, but a few surprises are nice here and there too.

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8

There's a feature on the new profile which puts a lot of the badge progress information in the same place. If you go to your profile, on the activity tab, in the BADGES box, there's a "Next badge" listed, and a little gear icon next to it:

If you click on the gear, a helpful dialogue shows up giving your progress towards various badges:

Not all badges are listed in the dialogue, but a lot of them are (a little over half, it would appear). I don't know if it varies from person to person or not.

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  • 1
    Also note, you can only see progress towards the nearest of bronze/silver/gold. It won't list a gold badge if you have not received the silver version already.
    – Qwerty
    Commented Nov 11, 2019 at 15:39
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You had to participate in the Stack Overflow beta to get the Beta badge and the beta closed some time ago.

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There are some applications, like StinkingBadges - Track your progress towards long-term badges which specifically use the API to track your progress on certain badges for you.

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  • 1
    Unfortunately, StinkingBadges cannot track your progress towards the sportsmanship badge because voting is private (see stackapps.com/a/3469/12034). Works great for many other badges though.
    – user164291
    Commented Sep 3, 2012 at 18:42
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This question has a feature request for the days in a row related to fanatic and woot.

My guess is tumbleweed is intentionally vague to allow for tweaking over time.

And beta can still be awarded, but not to a user who joins today. Only to a user who joined during the beta period and earns three bronze metals (Jeff states this here).

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I'm just going to point out here that for the Fanatic badge, there's now a section on your user profile that shows how many consecutive days in a row you've visited the site, so that progress is effectively visible.

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Tumbleweed - Pretty vague to allow for changes in the way it is awarded

Woot/Enthusiast and Fanatic - No real way to track it now through the StackOverflow user interface at this point.

Beta - This would be possible if you were active during the beta period of one of the sites. Meta did not have a beta period so this is pretty much a non-existent badge for Meta. All the other sites have either had it or will have it.

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It seems that Jeff changed his mind, and has implemented some badge progress indicators. This includes the Copy Editor badge (see More badge progress indicators) and the tag wiki editing badge (and probably others).

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I'd really love to see a column added to the Unearned badges page, with a progressbar in it next to each badge, that looks like these:

enter image description here

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