No sooner did I post a link to this room, than I got called away. I'm sorry, that was very rude.

@tohecz This is something that's been discussed a bit in the past, and there's some precedent - we adjust the privilege levels as a site grows.

That said, unlike privileges we try to tie badges very closely to specific actions on the site - which themselves become more or less possible as the site grows.

For instance, there's really no way to earn many of the gold badges early on - there just aren't enough users and/or posts.

But if you start out working toward silver badges, then gold becomes possible as the site grows.

The review badges are all based around doing x reviews - well, there is a finite number of things to review on small sites, and on top of that the number of reviews any reviewer can do per day is capped - so even if no one else is reviewing, you can't just plow through the queues.

That cap is raised when there is a backlog - so on SO, the close queue (and others from time to time) allow up to 40 reviews/day.

Even then, the sheer number of active reviewers limits what you can do.

On smaller sites, it's not uncommon to find a small backlog because only a tiny handful of people are interested in reviewing.

I'd argue those folks deserve a badge for their troubles - they're a big part of how we can operate these sites without legions of all-powerful moderators... And the headaches that such operations invariably involve.

I wrote about this a bit more extensively here: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251175/…

But back to badges... I'm interested to hear where you think we could do a better job of scaling the requirements according to the site and/or nature of individual sites.

@Shog9 no need to be really so much sorry, since inbetween, my computer went down. Well, I know that TeX.SX is strange, extraordinary, not following many SE policies etc., but we face the other problem: we have many users willing to review, but not being able to, because a pair of reviewers grab all the job (probably using a script and some sort of desktop notifications, but that's only my guess), and needed to say, the quality of their reviews is boundary-acceptable.

So the review badges, as an example, really do not work. I would so much love to obtain them (sarcasm), but even if I spend a lot of time on the site and I click the brown number every time it appears, and I try to review the posts well, I don't get anything, because these fast-clickers-low-quality reviewers are like a wall.

Actually, the view-based badges are a bit strange, too, the most views get either quite general and good questions or "do it for me" and therefore bad questions, for some strange reason. Etc.