New badges do not update your badge count when awarded?

Question

Following comments to this question, the issue described below is probably a recent bug that might affect the badge count of all users on all sites. Thus, much of my original question is probably not related to the root cause of this particular bug. Or maybe it is, you never know.

Today, to my surprise, I was awarded the Taxonomist badge on Stack Overflow. That was unexpected because I don't usually create tags there (but when I do, they're renamed in the next fifteen minutes).

To my even greater surprise, that badge did not reflect in my silver badge count, which remains stuck to 22 instead of the expected 23 (and I counted that twice... thrice... four times now).

Initial investigations on meta led me to Wrong Badge Count, and at first glance it explained the issue because I didn't believe the badge to actually be legit. However, further digging revealed that award is actually a side effect of one of my first edits on SO (I wasn't even realizing I was creating a new tag back then) and is perfectly legitimate after all.

That led me to Myself's answer to Rebecca's question, which acknowledges that Webmaster's Enthusiast badge was not recomputing the badge tally when awarded but, unfortunately, does not explain why.

Are there badges that do behave this way, and if so, which ones? Is there a legitimate reason for them to do so, or can they be fixed?

Answer 1

This was my fault, a backwards null check was doing the opposite of what's intended...it will be fixed in the next build and counts will sync themselves tonight.

For those curious: what we saw is sometimes a user got deleted mid-grant, so in a tight loop of "update counts on users who got badges" we'd have granted a badge, but then be unable to fetch the user throwing a null ref. Of course that check works better as a if (user == null) -> skip, rather than the opposite.

Update: deployed, badge counts will sync tonight (a sync actually runs every night, just in case)