One of the most important features of the Tom’s Hardware Community is the Badges system. Not only is it a great way to visibly reward and recognize the talent and expertise of many of our contributing users, but it provides those seeking answers with a visible indicator of trust that the solution they receive can be counted on. In this guide, we hope to educate and inform our users, both new and old, about how the badges system works.
Earning an Expertise Badge
As a confirmed, registered member, you gain progress towards earning an expertise badge by accruing Best Answers on threads that are tagged with the tag associated with the expertise badge. As an example, for every thread tagged with “Windows 8” that you receive a Best Answer for, your progress towards the Windows 8 expertise badge goes up by one. The number of Best Answers needed for each level of expertise badge is specific to each, though the typical values are 5 Best Answers for Level 1, 20 for Level 2, and 50 for the highest, Level 3.
When you earn a new badge, you’ll receive an email letting you know you’ve received it, so you can check on your status or make adjustments if desired. Upon earning a new badge, that badge will now display beneath your avatar on every thread tagged with that associated tag, so users know they are interacting with someone who knows their subject matter!
Each badge also has a unique title associated with it, like “Authority” and “Expert”, and you can set these as your status that displays beneath your avatar in the thread view. You can set what title to display from all those you’ve collected from your profile page.
Earning an Activity Badge
As a member, you can also earn other badges by performing certain actions, like uploading a custom avatar, sticking around in the community for a number of years, alerting the Moderation Team to a problem post, and receiving votes on your replies as well as other things. Like Expertise Badges, you’ll receive an email notifying you that you’ve won one, and they also come with unique titles that you can set to display through a setting on your profile page.
Earning a Legacy Badge
The only way to have earned a Legacy Badge is from having previous Bronze, Silver or Gold Badges from the previous forum platform. If you were a contributing member of Tom’s Hardware Community previous to the new version, you’ll find that all of your badges were transformed into exclusive Legacy Badges. These are exclusive, one-time badge awards to those users that have been with us the longest and contributed the most to the community in the way of Best Answers. The badges are ranked Legacy, Legacy+ and Legacy++ for Bronze, Silver and Gold respectively, and like the other badge types, come with a unique set of status titles.
Best Answer Count
When a reply you’ve posted to a Question-type thread has been selected as the Best Answer using the “Pick as the Solution” button, you gain a Best Answer for whichever tags that thread is tagged with. These Best Answers count towards your progress in earning a new Expertise Badge. Bear in mind that if the thread itself is untagged because those tags were not valid, you will lose that Best Answer, and this may even take you back a notch in terms of badges.
Best Answers can be selected by the Original Poster, Moderators, Administrators and users who have received a set number of Best Answers themselves already and are considered trusted members.
Finding Unanswered Questions
The best way to go after Best Answers is to find unanswered questions on topics you know the most about. To do this is a simple matter of navigating to the forum subcategory of your interest and click on the “Unanswered” tab at the top of the section. That will show you
all threads for which there are no replies and the user is still seeking a solution. You can also use the “Solved” tab to check out what kinds of solutions have been selected as Best Answers in the section, to get a better feel for what types of responses are helping users most. You can also find unanswered questions on the associated tag from your badge progress page by checking out the individual badge listing. From the badge listing itself, just click “See unanswered X questions” to view a listing of threads you might be able to offer advice on.
Exceeding the Badge System
Since the beginning of Tom’s Hardware, we’ve had overachievers involved in our community. With this in mind, we built in a way for users who excel at answering questions to exceed even the highest level of badges available for a given subject. After hitting 50, your badge in your profile will start to keep a count of how many you’ve achieved. After hitting the 100 Best Answers mark on a given tag, a number will appear next to your badge indicating how many Best Answers you have received, and this number will display on all your badge indicators, including in thread view.
Rankings
If you’d like to see how you stack up against other badge winners, you can check out the
Monthly Rankings and Billboards to see how many Best Answers have been earned per user for a given tag, as well as site-wide. You can see where you rank in comparison to other active users, and vie for position as top expert in the section. Here you can view ranks on a monthly basis (and see previous months, too), with your current score in Best Answers and posts.
My Badges
For quick reference, you can find all the badges you’ve earned so far as well as the progress you’ve made towards any new badges from your “
My account” area, which you can find a link to from the drop-down under your username in the upper-right corner of the screen. Badges you own are displayed with the white text in blue as “Earned”, and those you are working towards are shown as “In Progress” with a number indicating how many you’ve gained vs. how many are needed.
You can also find a full listing of all badges available and their requirements from the Badges Directory,
which can be found here.
Badges & Reputation Frequently Asked Questions
How Do I Improve My Standing?
Our community grants badges for subject matter expertise, earned through activity on the forums. Everyone has the opportunity to earn badges, which display in your profile as markers of progress in your contributions to the discussion. The number and type of badges you can win depends entirely on you.
What is a Badge?
A badge is a medal of honor, and a designation of esteem within the community. Badges help to identify and highlight the most active members, and presents a measure of trust amongst users.
How do I get badges?
You must be a registered user first. Then, the more you participate, the more you’ll earn badges. Some of the things you can do to earn badges include answering member questions, creating topics, commenting on the latest news, adding an avatar, or alerting moderation. Expertise Badges are also granted and based on forum category. You earn expertise badges by having your answer selected as the "Best Answer" in a section of the forum. The requirements to win a badge depend on the category, and the type of badge you are going after. There are also “Legacy” badges granted to long-time members of the community. You can find out more about badges at the following URL:
http://www.tomshardware.com/community/badges.html
What do I need to get to the next badge level?
For most badges, there are three levels of advancement. You can check the ongoing status and progress of your badges under your profile page under “Badges in Progress”.
Why haven't my badges updated?
Badges might take up to a day to update, so you might wait up to 24 hours or more before seeing the results of your recent actions on the forums.
Can't someone just post a bunch and answer their own questions to acquire badges?
Not really, and trying to fool the system and its safeguards may result in moderator action on your account. Multiple accounts used in this way may also result in penalty to your score.
Can I lose a badge?
Yes, if you are granted a badge based on the tags in a thread, and a moderator later determines that those tags are not valid – you might end up losing the Best Answer that counted for that thread.
Where are all my Best Answers?
In the previous version of the forum, all Best Answers in a category were added together to determine what badge you were awarded, and badges and Best Answers were based on a category.
Now, Badges and Best Answers are based on a tag. Many tags are automatically associated with forum categories, and the forum is organized in this way. During the transition, the tagging process was automatic and millions of tags were added to all existing threads. We did not force the sysytem to add specific tags to each category though - for instance not all threads in the Laptops & Notebooks category have the "laptop" tag, as some of them might have to do more with netbooks, and similar differences in other categories. This is why your Best Answers count might be different now for the "Laptops" badge as it was for the "Laptops & Notebooks" badge in the older version. You'll also note that you have new badges where you might not have before. Much of this, and tagging will depend on thread content in threads where you received a Best Answer.
What is a Legacy badge? What are the levels?
In the previous version, you had Best Answers, which got you Badges of differing levels at Bronze, Silver and Gold, depending on how many Best Answers you received. When the new version went live, all of these badges were frozen in place and transformed into Legacy badges of corresponding levels:
- Bronze became Legacy
- Silver became Legacy+
- Gold became Legacy++
You retain these badges of merit and previous progress today, and these are exclusive to you and your earlier contributions. There is
no other way to get them, apart from having been a very active member of the community before the transition.
How did the badges transfer from the UK/US mirror?
Because the two sites were essentially mirrors, and there wasn't a major difference in most categories between the two except for in rare cases with differing badge levels for some users, we took the higher of the two numbers of badges and applied them as Legacy badges to your profile. So if you had a Bronze badge in CPUs on the UK site and a Gold in CPUs on the US, you'll see that you've received the maximum level (Legacy++) badge in the current platform.
I have X Best Answers, but I used to have Y!
That's due to Best Answers now being calculated based on the number of Best Answers in threads that are tagged with that badge keyword. Above and beyond any previous badges earned in the older version that are now Legacy badges, your Best Answers in all threads tagged with badge keywords count towards
new badges. You may find you are already well on your way to achieving a high level badge in an area of the forum where you might not have spent a lot of time previously answering questions, but that the questions you did answer are applicable to that tag.
Update Note on Best Answer Numbers:
For each category and subcategory, we're going to select a main tag and add it automatically to all topics created there, whatever their content may be. This will increase the number of Best Answers on these tags and you'll see a number much closer to the one you had in the older platform. At current we expect this to take place by the end of the month of April.
What's this little number next to my badge?
After 100 Best Answers, a small number will start showing up next to the badge to indicate by how far past the upper threshold you've exceeded. We already have some of these users in the new platform due to Best Answers on threads previously tagged for a given subject. This is a way to compete with other experts on a subject beyond the domain of current badge levels, and will be considered a great matter of pride for anyone with that many Best Answers.
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I hope this guide has helped answer any questions you might have had about the new system, and I wish everyone best of luck and happy hunting for awesome new badges!
Warm Regards,
Joe Pishgar
Community Manager, Tom's Hardware