which got me curious - what happened to all those avatars?
Turns out these users don’t exist.
We probably shouldn’t grant badges to users that no longer exist? Or perhaps prevent them from being displayed? Regardless, they are ousting the avatars of the real users - the ones we care about!
Given when these badges were granted (at time of writing they were the most recent) I suspect they are granted when the user account doesn’t exist, as opposed to granted when the account exists and then not deleted on account deletion.
I think the user ids are residing in the incoming links table. Those records are not dependently destroyed, and the sharing badge query only protects against the user_id being null in the incoming_links table: