Badge for users who post a significant number of highest voted answers without being accepted

Question

I would like to suggest a new badge that will offer some consolation to users who have many upvoted answers on questions that never get accepted.

The criteria should be

1. Have x answers where your answer has the highest score (must be at least a +1),
2. The question must not have an accepted answer and remain unaccepted for a period of time after the answer was posted.

The idea behind this would be to encourage people to continue to answer questions even though they they participate in questions that often do not get accepted answered, as well as offer a consolation prize to users who happen to answer questions that do not get accepted.

I would also suggest the badge name be "Unappreciated" because the efforts of the user are not being appreciated by the original question asker.

Answer 1

First of all, what does it mean when an answer is accepted? It does mean that it suits OP. If the answer has many votes and not accepted, it doesn't mean that the answer was not appreciated. It means that the answer was actually appreciated by community and only OP didn't like it. The answer would be unappreciated if it was accepted but received no upvotes. For those answers, there are already Tenacious and Unsung Hero badges.

Answer 2

So I was curious how many people a badge like this would even affect, so I wrote up a Data Explorer query to check it out (hope I got it right): Users with unappreciated answers

Consider the following criteria for each answer to qualify:

• The question does not have an accepted answer
• The answer is the highest scoring answer on the question
• The answer is not community wiki
• The answer has a score greater than zero
• The user did not answer their own question

The query itself also only lists users with at least 10 qualifying "unappreciated" answers. The query also does not take into account the percentages present in the Tenacious / Unsung Hero badge set, nor does it make sure that the post is at least 10 days old like those badges do (we don't need to check for deletion here because deleted posts don't show up in the data dump).

The query will take a while to run if it doesn't remember the results, but it spits out a total of 5,556 eligible users based on those criteria. That's about 3,000 less than the Unsung Hero badge, which means it is a pretty rare occurrence.

But is that a good or a bad thing?

I do think that this badge would encourage positive behavior, which is what badges are for. It encourages users to continue answering questions which become the best answer on a question, even if they don't subsequently become the accepted answer. An answer such as this is still useful to the community at large, even if the OP doesn't think so or even just didn't get around to accepting it.

However, we should also consider if there's even a problem to solve, something that the encouragement would benefit. I think in this particular case it's hard to say if the low number means there's a problem that needs to be solved or if there's just not a problem.

Answer 3

This is not good. If OP would be aware of such a badge, he/she might not accept a good answer just to help OP get this badge. It's likely that OP would forget to check if the answerer received the badge and we will have a lot of unaccepted questions which could drive (new) users to answer with something trivial or wrong because they thing that the existing answer is not sufficient.