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I was a bit surprised by the Announcer, Booster and Publicist badges.

A snapshot of those three badges

If I understood, those badges requires you to share links to questions with the form https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/[ID_of_the_question]/[your_id]

I do think that I am constantly tracked on the net, and I don't think there is a need to overtrack my activities: if I want to share a link, I do not see why tex.stackexchange.com should know that I, personally, shared this link.

Plus, I guess that those badges could be easily won by a (ill-intentioned) person that artificially produces fake visits, for instance by DDOSing tex.stackexchange.com.

So no, this is not exactly a feature-request, more like "feature-delet-request".

Of course, I am still free to ignore those badges ;-).

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  • 2
    I have to say I always remove the <your_id> part :-) I've never really seen the benefit of them as a result!
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Jul 15, 2014 at 17:14
  • By the way, what's the actual question here?
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Jul 15, 2014 at 20:44
  • @JosephWright that's why you haven't got as much gold as Stefan:-)
    – David Carlisle
    Commented Jul 15, 2014 at 20:55
  • The idea was probably, in case something went viral, to find out, who shared the link and where etc. In return you get a counter increase in the yellow dots.
    – percusse
    Commented Jul 16, 2014 at 4:41

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
6

No need to your track your links and to match them with your account. StackExchange just needs that tracking to reward your links if you like, if you used that feature.

As Jay said in a StackOverflow blog post, "people will do anything for fake internet points", and also the mentioned badges are such "achievements". Well, kidding, it's about helping people, he said.

Good content, moderation tasks, and promotional work of users is encouraged by points and badges, that's why also promotion badges exist.

1
  • The point is that I do not think that "StackExchange needs that tracking", but I understood why it's been proposed, even if I disagree.
    – Clément
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 9:00
5

You can just copy the link of the question title

enter image description here

This is similar to copying the link directly from the browser hyperlink bar.

This option includes the question title in the URL, with the format

http://*.stackexchange.com/<post type>/<post id>/<post title>

and is void of any reference to you personally.

1
  • Yes, I know I could just bypass this feature, what I did not understood was why Sxe offers it. I see it as an intrusion in my privacy.
    – Clément
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 8:59

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