So the rarest badge of all is “Leader,” and that might be unattainable for us – the only one ever granted was to iNaturalist Admin.
Outside of that, the rarest badge that we ordinary folk could attain is “Famous Link”: posted an external link with 1000 clicks. Amazingly, 17 of those have been granted.
When you look at the complete list of badges, you see that there are three levels: bronze, silver, and gold. Unsurprisingly, gold badges overall are rare; the most-awarded gold-level badge is “Great Reply,” for recieving 50 likes on a reply; to date, 88 have been awarded. This contrasts with thousands of some of the silver- and bronze-level badges.
Surprisingly, there are silver-level badges awarded fewer times than that: only 48 “Regular” badges have been awarded, and only 36 “Higher Love,” for receiving 50 likes in a day, 5 times.
Even more suprisingly, there is a bronze-level badge that has been awarded even fewer times than that! “First Reply by Email” has been awarded only 26 times.
We have had threads discussing the gamification of iNaturalist; but in a sense, badges are a form of gamification of the Forum, too. Surely I’m not the only one who checks on the list of badges from time to time to remind myself how to earn them?
I totally check to see which badges I have earned. I don’t really have a problem with gamification though. Of course I am looking at things from my own point of view which prioritizes the observations and the data and just finds gamification a cherry on top that provides an extra bit of the fun (and a little dopamine hit).
Guilty as charged. I don’t really care about the badges, but I still find myself slightly disappointed when a post/reply gets just one to few likes/clicks or whatever for getting a badge. Haha
I do want that email badge, though. And I’m missing the bronze-level tutorial one, as I cannot figure out how to do it (maybe it’s impossible after doing the silver-level-badge tutorial?)
I am surprised that there are so few regulars. I could swear that I see more than 48 people regularly on here
AFAIK, Discourse uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) internally to delimit what constitutes individual days, with midnight in that system being the boundary between days. If that is correct, one could miss a day by visiting this forum just before midnight UTC, then not return again until just after the next midnight UTC. Though the two visits would be just barely over twenty-four hours apart, the time interval between those two successive visits could span a full UTC day.
On some other Discourse forums, you can experiment with this, because they allow users to view a table of statistics that includes all the users, except possibly those who have opted to hide their profiles. The table enables viewing of such things as the total number of individual users’ visits, likes received, likes given, posts created, and the like on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and all-time basis. It’s a treasure trove for those who are fascinated by statistics.
The rarest badges are those that aren’t available but should be. I’d like to see a Most Verbose Post Badge. There are some real contenders on this forum. ;-)
In my experience, this forum tracked user participation days in a 24-hour period beginning from the moment that I joined the forum (around 6:30 PM, after a webinar on how to use iNat). I could watch the number of user days tick over each evening.
Although here in Calgary, I am 7 hours behind UTC, so the timing could be a coincidence . . .
Yeah, I like to see those notifications, too. Some of them remind me about how I’ve been using up all my time when there are other things that need to be done.
I had been visiting this forum several times every day for a long time, unaware of just how long it was, then about a month ago (on September 9th) this surprised me by popping up …
. And I like giving 
