I have two thoughts for the day. 1) the theory behind how and why badges are awarded cannot change because there is too much invested to even think of a complete redesign. WCG cannot have even one cruncher lose a badge they previously earned, just because the rules change. 2) Shouldn't it be just as important to recognize someone with one/two/five/etc years crunching on a project as it is to recognize 90 days?

WCG didn't start with the badges initially; they were added after and just one badge for the 14 days. Last year the Gold/Silver/Bronze system was added acknowledging now up to 90 days. It's just so logical to consider extending the system to higher levels of recognition.

But there is a lot of work needed to design the higher level badges, create the jpg images for the 12 projects times the number of badges that the designers decide to do, then to write (and test) the software needed to assign the new badges.

As a task in the Marketing area (which includes tasks such as UD points, team badges, cobblestones/points, certificates), I want this task to be fairly high priority. When compared to the tasks in the Technical (servers, WU Release, Windows/Linux/MAC, GPU), Support (new crunchers, debugging errors, forum), Science (CHARMM, new projects) and Results (disk space, data export) areas of WCG, the crunchers cannot guess where a new badge project might be prioritized.

All of us who have forwarded an opinion on badges are not even a thimbleful of water in the ocean of WCG crunchers.