Reg reader achieves bronze badge, goes directly to jail Those of you who've been knocking around the El Reg forums for a while will know that we have a badge system designed to honour invaluable Reg reader contributions to the site, or at least acknowledge a certain degree of commitment to giving forth. To get a foot on the first step on the ladder of glory - the bronze badge - you …
You presumably need to maintain >100 posts in the past year, drop below that and you temporarily lose the badge.
I got close and chased it for a while but struggled finding two articles per week that satisfy all of; a) A subject I am knowledgeable upon, b) I have a thought upon that hasn't already been expressed, c) I give a crap about enough to post. Usually someone writes what I'm thinking expressed better than I would have and faster. So do I post lots of shite and/or 'Here, have an upvote' noise. Or do I STFU and remain badgeless?
The system seems to encourage inane chatter to me. X upvotes or net X in the past 12 months would be a more beneficial metric.
"2/. Respond with "Here, have an upvote/downvote.""
4/. Correctly label sarcasm as sarcasm, it helps the Americans
5/. Correctly label trolling as trolling, if helps the Americans
6/. Poke fun at the Americans but then explain you are making fun, or explain anything actually, you know why.
I was joking, it's British humour.
My son & I used to have "You're so old" contests in the same way one would engage in a "Your mom's so fat" juvenile amusement.
We had to stop when I nearly crashed my car from laughing so hard when my son cried from his booster chair in the back seat: "Dad, you're so old you farted like a tuba & we know it as The Big Bang!"
I declared him the winner, then got even by buying a metric fekton of refried bean & cheese microwave burritos for supper that night.
Teach the little monster to make fun of my gas. Bah!
=-)p
The system seems to encourage inane chatter to me. X upvotes or net X in the past 12 months would be a more beneficial metric.
I agree about the inane chatter, any forum that has awards for making a certain number of posts ends up with lots of "me too" posts from people just trying to get their post count up. But no system is perfect; your suggestion of rewarding upvotes instead would just encourage groupthink and karma-whoring, not the kind of critically minded discussion I'd like to see in the El Reg forums.
Fortunately I don't think enough Reg readers are bothered enough about the badges to actually chase them for the sake of it, so it probably doesn't matter much.
"I don't think enough Reg readers are bothered enough about the badges to actually chase them for the sake of it"
Yes...and no... I would gladly kill to be able to use the blockquote html tag.
...which is probably what d***** (strange nick, but who am I to judge?) did.
a) A subject I am knowledgeable upon,
b) I have a thought upon that hasn't already been expressed,
c) I give a crap about enough to post.
a) When has a) ever been a reason for someone Not to post on the Internet???
b) Hasn't stopped many people either.
c) Bored now....
Yes, I also briefly had a bronze badge when the system started and then it disappeared again after a while.
Can't say I'm that bothered about the badges though. Although the extra formatting would be nice - maybe El Reg could alter it so that those rights could stay enabled once granted even if the badge goes away again, please?
It took me ages, but a few months ago I finally made it to bronze! But sometimes it seems to disappear and reappear, I don't understand the logic. And the fuzz haven't turned up yet....
Ah, but there are two options for Bronze. Jail or suffering the <blink> tag. It starts with your badge :)
I find the comments at El Reg usually OK, sometimes great. Best if quality control is not needed, i.e., commentards sort it out by themselves.
And then Eadon got kicked, to the tune of very many very small violins, I am sure.
"And then Eadon got kicked, to the tune of very many very small violins, I am sure."
That was a truly sad day for the El Reg community. Eadon's shitposting was pure Reg gold; I had to replace a container's worth of keyboards because of him. Only Webster Phreaky ever surpassed him, but he seemed to have vanished before Eadon took over. Perhaps they were one and the same entity, and perhaps his ghost haunts the El Reg comments threads even to this day...
To avoid random spamming by the desperate.
I've often thought of exactly the opposite. I should get off my arse(*) one of these days and set up "bewildering-upvotes.com" (**) where each week members vote on the most boring/anodyne post on their favourite site and then everyone goes and gives it a thumbs up. Perfect for sad gits everywhere who fancy themselves as anarchists, but who are too polite to do anything naughty.
* and probably sit back down again if I want to do web coding
** motto: "Dada's not dead; it just smells a little funny" perhaps?
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