Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-27873943-20140317034744/@comment-5691231-20140317140540

If we enable them again, we will probably be seeing them badge farmin' folks again - but if we keep them disabled, we'd just be getting pestered by discussions to enable them again because obviously many users want them back (not saying Octa is pestering, don't get that impression; but these discussions will probably continue to the point where you can call it that).

We should just deal with the fact that there will be badge-hunters. The rule itself is enough to punish users who emphasise that - also:

"obviously edit milkers hunting for badges and you can't simply remove a badge from a user and that's the problem."

Not technically true - while you cannot manually remove a badge from a user, blocking them would remove all their badges till they are unblocked again - but when they are unblocked, that's supposed to mean "You are welcome to the wiki again". However, if they continue to violate the badge rules (or even other rules) after a few blocks (say 3, 4, etc.) then all their badges would be removed as they'd most likely be indefinitely blocked.

I agree with Octa and Game for the most part - it will probably induce a higher audience here, and:

"Abuse of stuff given to us is pretty normal for us humans."

That piece is true, and it's the reason I opposed shutting down all the other stuff we've intended to. Anything can be abused, and if we let people get away with it to the point we need to disable everything; that's our own fault.

I'm going to post the exact same thing I posted on the Featured Image/Article thread because it's applicable here:

''No matter what we shut down, there will always be rules, and there will always be users who intentionally break those rules. We have to learn to deal with them hand-by-hand, and not get rid of creative wiki ideas just because of these users. It's not worth the trouble when there's always going to be more to come.''