Can we have cross-site badges?

Question

In the early days of the Stack Overflow trilogy (including SO, Server Fault, and Super User), I noticed that many of the most active members were good contributors on all three trilogy sites. These days, with 150+ sites in the network, it's more true than ever that many people are active on several different sites.

This has led me to wonder about the possibility of cross-site badges, which would be awarded for a certain level of participation in multiple Stack Exchange sites. For example, there could be a hypothetical badge awarded for visiting each of a particular set of 3 different SE sites every day for a 15 day period. Or one for achieving 200 reputation on 5 or more sites. Or one for having an answer with +10 upvotes on each of 3 or more sites. (I'm not saying that these would be good badge criteria, just trying to provide illustrative examples.) Basically, these badges would reward people who don't limit their activity to just one site, and hopefully would encourage existing contributors who specialize in one site to branch out and look for new Stack Exchange sites to get involved in, thus strengthening the network.

Of course, the obvious problem is, which site(s) would these badges display on? Would they be associated with all the sites they were earned for, or would they display on every site at which that user has a linked account? And I have no idea what sort of problems could arise on the development side - there isn't really any other feature (that I know of) that really integrates different trilogy sites like this, so I can imagine it might be a lot of work to implement such a feature on the backend.

Is the cross-site badge idea something that people would be interested in? If the implementation details can be worked out, can we get this implemented?

Also, for the purpose of giving people on meta something to answer, what would be more good badge criteria? It's easy enough to come up with cross-site badge ideas of the form "[criteria for single-site badge] on [number] sites". What makes this feature really interesting, I think, is the possibility for badges that don't fit that pattern.

Answer 1

I've wondered about this, as I often look through user profiles, and their cross-site activity. Also since the question was asked, Stack Exchange now has tens of sites, not just three.

Here are some examples I've thought about;

• Duathlete — gold medals across two sites
• Triathlete — gold medals across three sites
• Decathlete — gold medals awarded across ten sites
• Multifaceted — edited your autobiography across multiple sites
• Millionaire — user to a combined reputation of a million
• Fingers in many pies — 15 sites with a user rep of 150+
• Running man — migrated a question between sites
• The Come Back Kid — nominated and won electoral vote for a moderator role across two or more sites. I also considered Megalomaniac and Powermonger, but these could possibly been seen as derogative.
• Media Mogul — Earned the Publicist badge on at least five sites. Or possibly Media Proprietor alt. From Wikipedia.
• Mastermind — great answer awarded on at least five sites
• Oracle — great answer awarded on at least ten sites
• Paxman — great question awarded on at least five sites. Paxman as in Jeremy Paxman This is perhaps obvious to only the British, an international name could be Interrogator.
• Elite - a user whom has offered and paid out bounties across multiple sites. Referencing the classic game status within the game Elite, alternatively Hustler Encarta dictionary definition "somebody who works aggressively and determinedly, especially to advance his or her career".

Not all the ideas are meant to be serious, but hopefully it might get the ball rolling.

As for where these badges would be displayed — just on the Stack Exchange page for now would do. Altering the user flair might be confusing, as only individual achievements are perhaps best represented, not collective ones.

Answer 2

One natural place for the "cross-site" badges, which I prefer to call "Network Badges" is the network profile. In my opinion, they should be displayed only when on http://stackexchange.com and not on the individual sites themselves.

This is what I have in mind:

(And there would be a new badges tab in the network profile page itself.)

Also, I prefer keeping it simple: Instead of whole new badges, we can just take some existing badges and "enhance" them. For example:

• Stack Exchange Yearling: have the Yearling badge in at least 5 Stack Exchange communities.
• Stack Exchange Altruist: have the Altruist badge in at least 5 Stack Exchange communities.
• etc.

Silver and gold versions can also be available, e.g. having the ordinary badge in 20 communities will give the silver network badge.

Answer 3

Network wide badges seem like a very good idea to me.

From what I've seen, it appears that it's difficult to get people engaged with a SE site outside of the one they initially joined. Usually people have one main site they frequent, and then barely any activity on other SE sites. One incentive to increase cross-site activity might be to introduce network-wide badges.

These might include, for example:

• Having over 1000 reputation on 5+ SE sites
• Have a question with 5+ upvotes on 5+ SE sites
• Have an answer with 10+ upvotes on 5+ SE sites
• etc.

I personally think this would be good for SE as a whole.

Answer 4

The idea of cross site badges has been running through my mind for a while. Then I came looking to see if anything had been posted about it. I found this 4 year old question with less than 500 views and 36 up votes. Not entirely sure what to make of that, but here is my suggestion.

At least to start and to keep as much as possible with the existing format and tools. Grant Meta.SE badges

• Bronze when a user has been awarded the same badge on 3 different sites.
• Silver when a user has been awarded the same badge on 10 different sites.
• Gold when a user has been awarded the same badge on 25 different sites.

Badges would be displayed to the left of the user image as in the image below, counts are inside of the circles (ring or solid), when clicked on it takes you the meta.stackexchange badge profile for the user.

I am sure lots of peoples would qualify for a Gold 'Autobiographer.SE' badge, for completing their profile on 25 different sites.

Some badges would be more difficult to get, For example getting a Bronze 'Great Answer.SE' (Gold level badge on specific sites) would not be be overly difficult for some cross discipline experts, but getting a Gold 'Great Answer.SE' for receiving this Gold level badge on 25 different sites could prove to be difficult.

The amount of new code to make this work is less than the existing suggestion, as it is a simple cross site badge count, and it provides rewards and challenges for all level of users. I like the answer by @wonea but it has failed to gain traction, some of those ideas might be incorporated later but as a tool to encourage cross site participation, it is bit heavy for a first implementation and requires more challenging logic to implement.

Answer 5

This would be great for keeping users active on multiple sites, especially beta sites. A lot of users join a beta site, seem interested in the site for a while, then leave the site and never come back again. I, myself, have done this before and struggled to come back. Some new badges would help motivate others to participate in other sites. This was very popular (for hats) for next year's Winter Bash:

This year there were two hats, Polymath and Running Ragged, for non-trivial participation on multiple sites. A few years ago there was a hat for asking (or answering?) on a new-to-you site at some score threshold (don't remember the details). Hats like these encourage breadth, which is good -- Stack Exchange has more than 160 sites, with new ones being added all the time. It's easy to lose track of other great sites on the network, either because we didn't even know about them or because we used to participate there and gradually lost touch.

So let's keep doing something along these lines. It should be more than "show up and vote once", and it should encourage contributing to the core Q&A. I don't think a hat for, say, reviewing on three different sites would be as valuable as one for providing good questions or answers.

I would also like to suggest some more badges to the list of proposed badges in the accpeted answer on this question:

• Billionaire - Gold badge - Earn 1,000,000,000 rep over all the sites

• Reliable User - Silver Badge - Earn 500 rep in 15 different communities

• Master User - Gold Badge - Earn 750 rep in 25 different communities

• Governor - Gold Badge - Be a moderator in three different sites

• On Fire - Silver Badge - Reach the rep cap on three different sites

• Beast Mode - Gold Badge - Reach the rep cap on five different sites