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In the famous Why is SE removing links and community ads about legal issues? question by Juan M. he has been awarded the Self-Learner badge with his infamous answer.

But:

  • The question is not his.
  • The answer is so far in the negative (-318 right now) count I don't know how this badge was awarded.

I guess that things are being manually touched somewhere (SQL? I hope not) and this is a bug.

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The question and answer were originally posted by Juan M, and during the first few minutes they were live they both had a positive score (+5 or so, if I recall correctly). If you expand the Nov 14 entry on his reputation page, you can see the first few votes were mostly positive:

enter image description here

The Q&A then qualified for the badge, so it was rightly awarded; .

As the question mentions,

[This post was originally posted by Juan M but ownership was changed with a post-dissociation tool so that the accepted answer would be pinned to the top.]

so that's where your confusion comes from. Yes, there was some trickery involved, but the system works as designed.

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    Ah! So the badges are awarded as soon as the threshold is reached regardless of a later status? I didn't know that it was that way. Thank you for the explanation.
    – Miquel Coll
    Commented Nov 20, 2019 at 10:50
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    @MiquelColl yes indeed. And once awarded it is not rolled back, even though the post in its current state no longer qualifies.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Nov 20, 2019 at 10:56
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    @Luuklag This is another reason why the author of the question should never have been hacked in the first place—it just causes inconsistencies like this. If everything were being done fairly, somebody should go into the database and remove the badge that, based on retroactive continuity, no longer applies. (In this case, it should be rolled back.)
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented Nov 20, 2019 at 15:27
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    Everywhere humans work errors are made @JasonBassfordSupportsMonica. Going into the database to remove such a badge, from an employee, serves no real purpose. They simply overlooked the fact that a self-answer doesn't stick to the top, those kind of things happen, no big deal. And who cares for those badges anyways. The only valuable badges on MSE are the tagbadges.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Nov 20, 2019 at 15:32

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