"New User of the Month" badge award broken

Hello everyone! :wave:

I have encountered an issue with the “New User of the Month” badge here on the forum. I tried contacting the mods to resolve things first. However, it’s been two weeks now and I still haven’t received a response yet. Hence I am pointing this out here in the forum feedback.

So ever since I joined the forum, I’ve been on a bit of an achievement hunt to get all the different badges that you can earn on here. I can be quite the completionist sometimes and I thought it would be a fun challenge to hunt for all the badges. ^^

The “New User of the Month” badge being a notable first challenge as once you fail to receive it, you cannot get it anymore at all. I tried my best to get it by helping people with possible solutions, chatting in the General category, giving feedback to people’s projects as well as opening some topics of my own.

Yet I didn’t receive it for the month of August (the month I joined), despite receiving a little over double the amount of likes compared to the two users that did get the badge awarded. Those users only earned 7 and 6 likes respectively in the month of August. And I have seen other new users of August with more than 7 likes received that month as well. Yet they also didn’t get the badge awarded.

The description of the “New User of the Month” badge reads the following:

This badge is granted to congratulate two new users each month for their excellent overall contributions, as measured by how often their posts were liked, and by whom.

What happened there? Did I not get liked by the right users or something? Are certain people’s likes “more valuable” than others and I just got unlucky with likes from “less valuable users”? Or is the algorithm to determine who gets the badge broken?

I was really hoping to get the badge as I was specifically trying to get it. I am quite disappointed I didn’t receive it, despite my efforts of helping the community. Especially cus there is no other way of getting it now besides making a new account and trying over.

Is there perhaps still a chance to get it awarded manually? It would be quite sad to not get it now, despite having received more likes that month than those who did get the badge. If there were new users of August that received even more likes than me, then I would understand not getting it. But not getting it just because the algorithm to pick out the user is broken is pretty frustrating.

Thank you for reading and your support. :>

Sorry to hear you weren’t awarded the badge.

My complete guess would be the “whom” part of the description. That some users likes are indeed more “valuable” than others. Probably users that have been members longer, or themselves have more posts/likes/solutions etc.

Not sure how much information you are able to gather, but you could try checking if the people who got the badge had likes from more “experienced” users.

Hopefully this doesn’t discourage you and stop you from continuing to contribute to the community! :pray:

Honestly, it kinda has. Definitely noticed myself being less active as the month turned. It just feels pretty depressing to know I might be locked out of the 100% badge completion now despite all my efforts. And it’s so frustrating having had to wait for weeks now and still no official response from a mod. Neither here, nor via DMs.

@godot_team @Calinou @winston-yallow @Emi
Sorry for tagging all of you but I would just love to finally hear from a mod on how the award works and why I didn’t get it. I didn’t know who of all the mods to tag here, but perhaps one of you can redirect this to somebody who knows how the system works.

The exact criteria are mentioned here:

Apparently, likes from staff are weighed differently from regular users too, which impacts this award: