I just noticed that  got a Famous Question badge for .  However, the question has a negative score. How come the badge was awarded for what appears to be a "bad" question?
123121
The Famous Question badge is awarded for question with 10.000 views.   I've seen questions with negative scores to be used as a reference to golden Famous Question badges. Why isn't there an additional requirement to have positive score on that question?  Is the intention of this badge to indicate helpful and interesting question or just number of views?
103034
In my "achievements" menu on the top bar, I was told that I earned a badge for a question, and to see my profile.    Anyway, the link took me to the post in question, not to my profile.  Maybe we should have the post title link to the post and "your profile" link to the profile?
122427
Some badges like the  requires one to be the first to answer. I have cases where my answer was accepted like , and the answer previous to mine was deleted, thus making my answer the only one.  Is a deleted answer counted as the first answer?  Does it prevents a question for awarding the "first to answer" type of badges?  I understand that some answers might be related to experience, but I would be inclined to accept an answer that provide an official documented reference.
63013
Actually this was quite surprising. A casual troll in the Users Page revealed few users with negative vote. One example is here    Then trying to see what could have causes such a low reputation, I peeked inside the Profile Page of this particular User and was surprised to see a decent positive score.    Can someone explain to me how this can be possible?
54537
The question by  got me thinking. This has been raised on , but has been declined. Would someone with lesser rep or a less famous name have received the same number of votes/answers as Joel? I know the question was briefly closed, but it got reopened when the intent was made public. I think someone did try it, but I don't think their question was suitable for the experiment and it was soon closed. Similarly, do answers by Jon Skeet and others with &gt; 20K rep garner more votes than equally correct answers by others less notable? Is this because of their name, their rep, or the fact that the answer is correct? I would hope it's the latter, but perhaps we ought to find out. I wonder if the following experiment would yield any useful information: If Jon created a second account under a pseudonym and posted a few answers along side slightly &quot;worse&quot; answers credited to Jon so we can see which ones garner the most votes. Another experiment (though this would require a change to SO) could be to hide the identity of the poster for a period (a day?) but leave the (approximate) rep score visible. This might show whether people were using the rep as a guide. On a personal note, if there are two equally correct answers I tend to award my up-vote to the one with the lowest rep score - to spread &quot;the love&quot; around (so to speak). NOTE I'm not saying that questions and answers should be permanently anonymous, or that there shouldn't be a way of finding out the identity of a poster straight away. I just feel that the question or answer should be judged on its own merits rather than the perceived merit of the poster.
118789
This proposal was superseded , which improves on the core concept.   Early on, there was a question about whether Stack Overflow should . At the time,  was:  Getting answers is reward enough for asking questions.  Even then, Stack Overflow was getting more than enough questions, so it didn't make much sense to incentivize more questions.  lists the badges that can be earned by asking quality questions. (There are at least 8). But looking at the list of recent , it looks more like a list of . These badges are difficult to come by in the first place, and they're much harder to earn on sites like  even though there are some  on that site. It turns out that . We , but we still need plenty of oysters. The Student bronze badge is awarded for the first upvoted1 question. There are no equivalent gold or silver badges. Therefore, I'd like to propose the following:  Student—Asked first question with score of 1 or more Sophomore—Asked 10 questions with score of 1 or more Socrates—Asked 50 questions with score of 1 or more  Do you have any suggestions of better names/levels?  To give you an idea of how many of these badges would be awarded, I wrote . The results2 for the original trilogy: users   gold silver bronze none    Site Name  ------- ---- ------ ------ ------- ---------  3000344 7127 67713  805778 2194566 Stack Overflow 235053  115  1698   53073  181980  Super User 156773  53   1191   40063  116710  Server Fault  The gold version on SO would be slightly more rare than  and more common than . Obviously, there would be fewer badges for smaller sites: 5545    1    18     917    4628    Philosophy 4032    4    41     802    3230    History  5663    3    28     917    4746    Parenting   Several older sites would get none at all: 5778    null 29     1063   4715    Quantitative Finance 7884    null 20     927    6957    Project Management 4333    null 17     1630   2703    Motor Vehicle Maintenance and Repair  These smaller sites get at most . I suspect that a gold or silver badge would encourage site regulars to increase that number without sacrificing quality. Certainly the requirement for those questions to stay in positive territory would prevent a person from flooding the site3 with terrible questions in order to get the badge.   1. The [original spec](https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-badge-feedbac/) didn't consider voting at all for Student and Teacher.   2. Your results will vary from mine since I'm looking at slightly newer data. The bronze badge count also differs from the number of [Student](https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/2/student) badges because the badge isn't revoked when a user's question is later downvoted or deleted.   3. There is a potential problem with cookie-cutter or variation-on-a-theme questions. However, I think the typical tools for closing and deleting questions will prevent people from gaming the system for these badges.
43868
I understand the purpose of up/downvoting answers -- some answers are better than others, some answers may be wrong, .etc.  With regard to questions, though, there are other mechanisms to deal with "bad" questions:  comments, close, flag.  A poorly written question should be improved.  A bad question should be closed/deleted.  Often, though I see poorly written questions downvoted. I'm not sure what this accomplishes.  I get loss of rep for offensive or spam questions, but for an off-topic question?  or one that is just poorly written?   Why?  It seems to me that rep ought to be based more on answers on a site of this type.   Fundamentally, it seems that rep ought to be based on what you add to the site, not what you ask of it.  A particularly good question does add to the site, but a poor question doesn't really detract from it in the same way that a bad (wrong) answer does. Sure, go ahead and give people more rep for asking a particularly good question, but why punish people for asking bad questions when there are other ways of handling that.  Why not handle questions more like comments and allow upvotes, but not downvotes?  It seems to me that many, if not most, of the downvoted questions are first timers.  It's more likely that your first introduction to the site will be in asking a question, rather than answering. There is a significant risk to alienating new users when their questions are downvoted -- there's a visceral response to seeing that negative number next to your question.  Why not let the close/flag system weed out questions that don't belong and the comment system work to improve poorly worded questions.
13735
seems to be the opposite of . Back then,  included a nice analysis of what the effect would be when this change occurs.  I think it would be nice to have an impact analysis (something more substantial than the askers will gain more reputation which is quite obvious).  A particular point of this analysis would be the following case (questions):   score &lt; 0 current reputation gained by user from the question &lt; 0 new reputation gained by user from the question > 0   If there are many such cases, it would significantly encourage asking bad questions.  Question: Is there any impact analysis being done for the question reputation change similar to the one done in the past?
59370
The following scenario happened to a question of mine today:   I asked a question to a topic I'm pretty new to. Someone answered the question, it absolutely satisfied my points, so I upvoted and accepted it.   But a few minutes later he got heavily downvoted because (as I understand it) the way he explained the points were completely wrong and they said his words just show he has no clue about the topic.  So he deleted his answer, which made me sad as I thought it will be lost.  But it wasn't.  His answer is still in the question. It has a weak colour, as an answer has of my own after I deleted it. But why? Is this just to me, as I'm the one who upvoted it? Or is it because at the point he deleted it, it was the accepted answer?  And is this just visible to me?  Or anyone can still see it?  And I also noticed he still has the +2 rep he got left from his answer (after downvoting) so is this really a deleted answer?  What's going on?
14592
I saw a 1 character  and wondered why; apparently it was after my (less-comprehensive) answer was accepted, to allow the check-mark to be transferred to the higher voted answer (written by the asker) after giving himself a Populist badge.  I think that self-answers should be ineligible for the Populist badge.
6381
I don't like seeing negative score as the value of a question. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it just does not look good when a question has a -1 or -5 score.  This is especially annoying when someone adds a negative vote to your question. I even feel offended when my own question suddenly becomes a -1 or lower.  I have a feature request: Allow negative votes as before but when displaying a score, show the 0 score instead.   This may be implemented easily like score=max(0, score) or something like that.  The negative votes will still be allowed but will only affect questions that already have some positive score, will have no affect on 0 scored questions.  What do you think?
99560
If I answer a question and vote for a competing answer, I am on my way to the Sportsmanship badge. What about if I:  a) delete my answer after voting for a competing answer  -- or  --  b) delete my answer before voting for a competing answer  -- or  --  c) delete my answer, vote for a competing answer, get abducted by aliens, the aliens using my account undelete my answer  Do any of those scenarios count towards the badge?    And just for the hell of it - what if I undo my vote for the competing answer?  This, of course, is not the result of alien abduction. Duh. This would be the result of a kidnapping where the kidnappers force me to undo upvotes under threat of serious injury or death.
54737
"Voted on 600 questions and has better than 3:1 answer/question vote ratio" is the current text.  "Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions" is my proposed text.  (Or should it read "or less"?  I'm still not completely sure what is intended.)  "Better" in the original doesn't indicate which way is preferred (and it's not clear to me one way or the other is better, merely that a certain threshold is the requirement for this badge).  This is even slightly shorter, in both characters and as displayed for me in a proportional font, which should help for a badge with one of the longest current descriptions.
92948
I have experienced this on a couple of sites (and I'm ) :    You look through the question list. You see a pretty bad (or at least not-so-good) question heavily upvoted. Or even worse, a very poor answer to a good question - upvoted to stratosphere.  Or even worse, a very poor/incorrect answer upvoted high up - and a later, correct answer, languishing with a couple of upvotes (since the flood of views is no longer there). Upon checking, you see tons of views, which came from SE Hot List inclusion.   So, people see an "interesting" "fun" question, head on over in mass numbers (especially if the destination is a smaller site), and due to association bonus, can - and do - upvote any random "fun" crap that's "hot" yet to an expert on the topic is at best not worth being upvoted (and at worst should be downvoted).  As per @Thursday's comment, this is made even worse because of the asymmetry of hot list effect: those coming from Hot Questions may recognize the question is crap, and perhaps 50% of them would downvote it under normal circumstances. But having only 101 rep, they can't. The 5% who want to upvote (for reasons that are difficult to fathom) can and do. Result: vote count that does not represent the opinion of either the particular community, nor the network at large.   UPDATE: The above effect just got a spectacular . As of this moment, the bad answer has only 7 downvotes (and 20+ upvotes), despite the fact that my comment which indicates it's a bad answer in need of downvotes has 23 upvotes - 3x number of people agreed that the answer is bad, than actually downvoted   One solution presented to this dilemma - which seems a bit too heavy-handed - is to .  My suggestion is a much more surgical and localized:  Do not allow voting in the following case:   The question is currently in SE hot list The user's reputation on the site NOT counting association bonus is not enough to upvote.   Note that an association-only users can still upvote any other content on the site - or even questions that used to be on hot list but aren't anymore.    As an example, an answer posted by myself recently was upvoted to 100+. It wasn't a bad answer, but if I'm being honest with myself, it clearly wasn't great enough to deserve 100+ upvotes that it got thanks to hotlist
26803
Almost every time a colleague of mine asks a question, we have discussed this problem beforehand. Also, we sometimes meta-discuss the question for stackoverflow (why did I get the &quot;this might be subjective&quot; warning, is this understandable enough, etc). This is less so with answers, but I could believe for some groups this works the same. For now I'll stick to questions, but you could s/question/answer if you like. The resulting question is almost always  Interesting for me, and a problem I don't know the answer to. I probably would favorite it According to me a valid and good question (as we talked about it beforehand) I would probably want to upvote it.  Now I believe to read that &quot;ring voting&quot; is a thing, and I tried to find some questions about this, but didn't find many. I did find and read this blogpost from 2008:  . It reads to me that upvoting 'fraud' is more commonplace then downvoting and it might seem anomalous that I would upvote almost all questions from one user. If all colleagues would do this to their team, you'd get some mediocre questions getting a lot of votes, and some users getting a lot of attention, points etc from that. If you would -as seems to be done -, sort the amount of upvotes for my colleague, you'd get me being 'anomalous' in front of the crowd. On the other hand, as explained above, I do want to upvote almost all stuff some of my colleagues put on here for (I believe) the right reasons: they are questions I consider good and interesting. It's just that I know of all their questions (as they tell me about them), which obviously isn't the case for a random user. So what is the deal?  When is upvoting content from one user frowned upon? Would my usecase be in danger of being a (what I consider 'false') positive for the fraud-detection? (and would you agree with that or not) How to prevent this false positive (if you agree with me it is one, otherwise this is a moot question) -&gt; As noted in the comments: I'm not looking for tricks, so an answer could be &quot;don't vote for your colleagues&quot;. I agree that there should be no to 'tricks' around that could be used for real fraud of course
36891
I was wondering about a question similar to  (for another site), where my &quot;stats&quot; are currently &quot;10/5&quot; (instead of &quot;13/5&quot;). The answer from &quot;Shadow Wizard&quot; links to , which links to yet another &quot;&quot;. This last answer has some details about the actual calculation (like the &quot;10&quot; in my case), which is like so:  A positive question record means you don't have too many closed, downvoted or deleted questions, overall. The formula is (total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions &gt;= 0.5. Questions that have been downvoted and closed and deleted count three times in this calculation!  Somewhere I also read that these deleted questions seem to count for 3. But the OPer of a deleted question cannot see deleted questions anymore after a while (X days) either. So that seems to make it impossible to actually &quot;verify&quot; your own score (the &quot;7&quot; part), and also how many more &quot;good questions&quot; will be needed. In my case, I'm aware (remember) that there has been at least 1 question deleted. So I assume in my case the &quot;7&quot; must become at least &quot;8&quot; (I don't have negative or closed questions), though I doubt that will be sufficient. Also because I have 2 more questions with a zero votes balance (which makes me wonder also how accurate the &quot;total questions&quot; in the above quote really is ...). My suggestion: think of a way to somehow clarify (visualize) the formula quoted above. Or as a variation at least provide some way to find out the exact number of you questions that were ever deleted (not just the recently deleted ones). Or maybe some other type of indication to indicate &quot;how much more good questions are needed to ever receive the &quot;Curious&quot; badge. Update: I recently learned about adding deleted:yes to a query. With that, these are some more stats about my questions (using &quot;12345&quot; to represent my user id from the site where this question is about):  user:12345 is:q - results in 14 (not deleted) questions, 11 of them have a positive (&gt; 0) voting balance, none of these 14 are closed.  user:12345 is:q deleted:yes - results in 7 (deleted) questions, with this Status / Voting balance for each of them:       Question id Status Voting Balance     1 Closed +4   2 Duplicate +2   3 Migrated 0   4 Duplicate 0   5 Duplicate 0   6 Closed -1   7 Closed -4     So with that extra info, and as per the &quot;Questions that have been downvoted and closed and deleted count three times in this calculation!&quot; I think (guess) in my case the 2 deleted questions with negative voting balance corresponds to -(2*3)=-6 ... So that the &quot;stats&quot; in my case will have to become something equivalent to &quot;(11-6)/5&quot; = &quot;5/5&quot; ... Just guessing, and fingers crossed to see what will happen if I ever post a new question on that site that does not get downvoted+deleted (assuming all other votes for my existing questions don't change in the meantime).
91229
I've seen several cases where newcomers are confused about not receiving badges like  and , even though they have posts with "scores" that seem to justify the achievement (or tags where they seem to have earned the badge). A couple of examples:          I suggest the wording be updated to say something other than "score" since it is currently ambiguous whether it means rep or number of votes, and also whether it is net or gross, e.g. if I get 10 up-votes and then a down-vote, did I earn a badge? What about if I get 9 up-votes, then a down-vote, then a 10th up-vote? Does order matter? Is this calculated once daily, or as soon as my post receives 10 (or 25, or 100) up-votes?  I realize that we can't encompass all of that text into a simple badge description, but how about instead of:     Answer score of 25 or more.    It says:     Answer with net up-votes of 25 or more.    This will help eliminate any confusion that users have, thinking that "score" means "reputation."