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A Stack Overflow user has recently earned the tag badges ruby, gmaps4rails and google-maps over the past day.

The same user has recently been retagging questions to add the tag ruby, gmaps4rails and google-maps to them.

I've asked the user about his retagging as I think some of the retags to ruby were unhelpful.

Regardless of the behavior of this particular user (I only asked him about the retagging 2 hours ago), is this a potential motive to abuse retagging (akin to the taxonomist badge)?

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  • Someone is astroturfing gmaps4rails
    – random
    Commented Oct 31, 2011 at 1:27
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    I'm sure this is a duplicate of another question (whose link/name/anything I cannot recall) that tested adding tags to bobince's famous HTML/RegEx answer and watched him get badges, but since this is an actual case of abuse, +1.
    – John
    Commented Oct 31, 2011 at 1:37
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    @John: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/30193/tag-badges-exploit is what you're thinking of, but that was seen as an white-hat abuse of a wildly popular answer, rather than an abuse of retagging.
    – Andrew Grimm
    Commented Oct 31, 2011 at 1:46
  • True. Point being I knew there was some kind of difference. :P
    – John
    Commented Oct 31, 2011 at 2:01

1 Answer 1

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I asked this question on SO meta and this seemed to be the general consensus.

Bolt Clock-

If the tag is totally relevant to the question, then IMO it's only fair that your answer to that question count toward the respective tag badge. After all, it's a question you answered about the topic. If you answered twenty questions about iOS, and every one of them had any combination of (and all the other UIKit classes) but none of them had , you wouldn't have the iOS bronze badge, and that would be a shame. (You might gain an Xcode tag badge, despite the fact that none of the questions pertain to Xcode specifically.)

Just don't go doing this all the time, mmk? ;) Also, make sure you're not doing this with new tags (once you gain the tag creation privilege that is) or tags that are relatively obscure. If a tag is too obscure it's more likely to be seen as a cheap attempt at a badge than an improvement of a question. (That doesn't mean there is a correlation between the two, but that's just how things are.)

While we're on the topic of editing, and badges, the best time to edit a question you've answered is within 12 hours either before or after answering. If you take the time to improve the content of the post along with the tags, your edit will count toward Explainer/Refiner/Illuminator. I think as long as you focus more on improving the post and less on getting badges, you'll earn them in due time, plus you make the site a better place. Everyone wins.

But of course if the tag is pointless, that is a problem.

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  • Cross site points. Enjoy!
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 12:02
  • @ShadowWizard, Huh??!! What does that mean?
    – Caleb Kleveter
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 12:03
  • lol, just means you get reputation both on MSO and here on the same issue, but on second thought, no reputation on MSO so I was wrong. :-)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 12:04
  • @ShadowWizard, right, but why would I have got it if I could get reps on SO meta?
    – Caleb Kleveter
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 12:05

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