Tweak the definition of Unsung Hero and Tenacious Badges

Question

The newish badges for accepted answers with no upvotes are very welcome, but might I suggest that the definitions be tweaked to include zero and single-upvote accepted answers, or at least those where the single upvote is from the OP?

My reasoning is simple - it doesn't (usually) make sense to accept an answer and not upvote it. Most commonly this happens on questions posted by those new to the community. So one could take the view that there is little difference between zero and single-vote accepted answers.

It strikes me that there are probably a number of answerers helping out experienced users with obscure questions that are not being rewarded.

Edit: In the light of recent question Do negative score/accepted answers count towards tenacious/unsung hero? any new opinions on this proposal?

Answer 1

I agree in principle with this change but it raises 2 very real problems.

1. We would be compromising vote anonymity
2. We would have to heavily change the ratio needed to grant unsung hero.

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Under the new proposed system

If a person sees that a user has the "unsung hero badge" he can quickly determine which of the accepted answer posts the user has, were upvoted by the question asker. For posts with the score of 1, that are also accepted, it is very likely that the upvote came from the question asker.

Also if we were to adjust the rules now, the 25% ratio is way too lenient and would result in 4000 people getting a gold badge. We would have to raise the ratio to 50% to compensate which would be a bit rule change.

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Thus I am inclined to decline this even though I like the suggestion. Compromising vote anonymity in a radical way is not something we can do.

Answer 2

The 20% of total seems a bit stiff for those who have been around for awhile. Almost 50% of my answers are zero-votes and 7 of them are accepted, but because I have 250+ answers, I haven't been award with [tenacious]. The definition of 'total' being used isn't that clear to me. From what I read here, I'd need to have 50 accepted zero-vote answers to qualify for the 20% of total part.

How about changing the 20% to be the ratio of total answers to zero-vote answers, e.g. 100 total answers with > 20 zero-vote answers and 5 of the zero-vote answers having been accepted.

It's true that tenacious is supposed to imply a don't-give-up quality but not one of I-never-get-upvotes-but-keep-answering-obscure-questions-anyway.

If the 20% means 1-in-5 zero-score answers are accepted then this badge is rewarding the lucky as much as the lazy. The requirements for the Tenacious badge can be interpreted thus:

• be lazy, answering more questions decreases your chances which implies that answering more questions is of less value.
• be lucky, in that posters who asked question accept your answer but not upvote it.

So far, the people who get this badge are being rewarded for showing up, not working too hard, and finding questions asked by users who don't bother to upvote answers they accept.