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I recently posted a question that received some upvotes: tilted planes as scopes

However - I didn't get any answers, perhaps because the problem was a little involved. So I decided to offer a bounty, because I really needed a solution.

Even with the bounty, it seems that nobody was interested enough to work on an answer, so I invested some time and came up with an answer myself, which I accepted shortly before the bounty period expired.

Now the bounty (and grace) periods have expired, my question has received more than 10 upvotes and my answer has received two upvotes.

If this question would have been answered by anyone else than myself, the situation would have triggered half of the bounty amount to be auto-awarded to the answer. As it stands, this didn't happen.

I don't want my reputation back - after all, I offered it, knowing it would be gone for good. But somehow I feel that this kind of thing should be worthy of a badge:

  • a question is asked and receives at least 10 upvotes
  • a bounty is offered on the question
  • the person asking the question answers their own question within the bounty period
  • at the end of the bounty period, the answer of the person who asked the question has received more upvotes than any other answer posted

Do you think these would be sensible criteria for a badge? I personally think that having more badges would be nice, but I can also see how one might argue that too highly specialized badges would trigger people to behave strangely just to earn badges.

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    Highly-specialized badges are what secret Winterbash hats are all about! Oh, you're talking about a real badge. Requirements for these things should be weighed up through queries to see how may people might suddenly receive this, as well as suggest a badge class (bronze, silver or gold). Finally, this would be something that covers the entire network (of course), and would therefore be better-suited on Meta.SE using the tag badge-request.
    – Werner Mod
    Commented Dec 20, 2014 at 19:46
  • Does "a bounty" refer to the questioner or anybody?
    – Werner Mod
    Commented Dec 20, 2014 at 19:48
  • 3
    There are some badges related to some of these aspects already, including Self learner (once only) and the Nice question/Nice answer hierachies.
    – Andrew Swann
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 9:30
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    I don't see any downsides to this as criteria for getting badges are arbitrary and they allow for a fun mini-game to the more experienced question answerers.
    – 1010011010
    Commented Dec 25, 2014 at 9:44
  • Well, the existence of some badges clearly skews the behaviour of some users in somewhat disruptive ways at times. However, I don't see any obvious danger of that with these specific criteria. They are a little complex, though, and I wonder if that's a consideration. Most badges seem to be associated with relatively simple criteria (1 or 2 requirements rather than 4).
    – cfr
    Commented Dec 28, 2014 at 1:09
  • Note that it is a jump to conclude that nobody was 'interested enough'. It might just be that nobody felt able to answer. Or, even, that the question has no reasonable answer at the present time. (Some questions would require significant rewriting of an engine's internals, but even needing the development of a new package is a lot to ask. And sometimes it is not obvious to the person asking that what is being asked really is rather a lot i.e. it isn't clear that X is really difficult since it seems simple enough as a question.)
    – cfr
    Commented Dec 28, 2014 at 1:12

2 Answers 2

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I've been thinking about this proposal for a while. At first glance, I like it, but I'm not quite sure what the purpose of the badge would be. All of the badges we've introduced recently have been intended to send a message. Mostly, those messages are along the lines of encouraging some kind of positive behavior that we want to see more of.

I guess you could argue that this promotes people continuing to work on their problems, not simply giving up after offering a bounty. Or perhaps a consolation prize for bounties that didn't attract great responses, without being so broad that people would offer meaningless bounties just for a badge? Neither of those is particularly convincing to me, but I'd be happy to listen to arguments (especially if I missed the point you were going for).

For what it's worth, I found roughly 20 posts on this site that could qualify for this badge, if it existed today. I say "roughly" because I took some shortcuts when searching, like ignoring the "at the end of the bounty period" criterion.

(What's that? Because cross-referencing against the vote timeline would have been a lot harder, that's why.)

Twenty is juuuuust few enough that I don't mind linking them all for reference:

How can I print only Author-Date of the parent crossref in the bibliography entry of the child of the crossref?
Best Practices for Lua Modules
Use latexmk to filter the log file
GitHub-like punchcard with the help of pgfplots
Arrow with superscript in tikz-cd
How to draw points in TikZ?
Guidelines for customizing biblatex styles
Creating resources for a currently unsupported language
Patched version of pdftex does not see what kpsewhich sees
Poisson disc sampling implemented in luatex
Frequently loaded packages: Differences between XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
A ligature for she/he
How to define the badness of a river?
tilted planes as scopes
Handling different time zones
Repetition of a word on two lines
A collection of LaTeX equations?
PSTricks transparency does not work with MikTeX's XeLaTeX
Showcase of translations to Asymptote from TikZ/PSTricks
Revisiting producing structured PDFs from LaTeX

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I don't see why Benefactor and Altruist couldn't be expanded to include not awarding the bounty manually if you answer the question yourself and if the answer has positive score. It would make much more sense than including yet another (and probably very rare) badge.

However, I think that this is going to be considered too minor change/impact to ever get implemented.

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