Has anything changed on what qualifies for the “Nice share” badge?
In 4 years, I never received this badge. But since the beginning of September, I have received 3. That’s not much in total but a lot compared to the 50 months where I didn’t receive any.
In the rare cases where I have shared a link externally, I have usually also removed the username. And while I couldn’t remember any reason why I might have shared this post somewhere else at all, I wasn’t 100% sure that this didn’t happen. I thought maybe I had shared them with one user in a DM chat on another Discourse forum, though it seemed unlikely that this could result in 25 shares. But after the third badge, I checked this. Links to those topics aren’t in our chat conversation, so I wonder where those shares come from.
Is it possible to find out where I shared these links? There is a feature request for this, so probably not.
So for now, I’ll stick with ‘I have the feeling that something has changed here and is no longer working as expected’. But I have no idea how to proceed.
It hasn’t happened anywhere else. But I would be surprised if it did, as the other forums are much smaller – meaning fewer posts from me linking to other posts and fewer readers clicking on the links.
I think what’s probably happening here is that meta has been hammered recently by bots:
This badge is granted for sharing a link that was clicked by 25 outside visitors. Thanks for spreading the word about our discussions, and this community.
I think you need clicks on a different host than the current forum, so bots here shouldn’t trigger that. At least that’s what ask.discourse explained based on
Slipping this across to Site feedback since it seems to only be affecting us here on meta.
I think it’s probably still bots and there isn’t really anything to do here. I haven’t noticed getting any more badges myself or heard anyone else mention it.
We can keep this topic open in case it occurs again and we learn something new.
Today I received the badge on another forum. I joined that forum almost a year before I joined Meta, and today is the first time I’ve received the badge. Again, I don’t remember sharing that link anywhere else, but I used it in one post within the forum in August.
Not sure if this adds any helpful information. The forum is still on 3.6.0.beta1-dev.
OK let me slip this back to Support if you think it’s also happening on other Discourse sites. I haven’t heard anyone else ask about this before and I have not experienced it myself anywhere but on meta, but this is the biggest public site that I participate in. I get nice share badges fairly consistently so I am not seeing a particular uptick for myself.
It would be nice to have a report to see trends over time with the awarding of badges. I had a quick look and didn’t immediately find a data explorer query for it.
Similar story here - I got 3 nice share badges 17 hours ago, and 2 more 2 days ago. Not sure what’s going on here - I’ll see if I can get someone to look into it.
I had a look at our IncomingLink records and it seems like recent “visits” are all attributed to bots/crawlers. The bad news is that we have no rate limiting surrounding this area of code so a crawler can easily contribute 5 visits within a couple of seconds.
We are currently deliberating on a fix here and should have more to share soon.
The fix has more than halved my badges; instead of 76, I now only have 31. Unfortunately, that’s still 30 more than expected. After all, the links are only here in the forum and should, therefore, not fulfill the ‘outside’ criterion.
We do check that the host of the referer does not match the host of the forum and not count that as a “visit” if that is the case. Looking at a couple of “visits” for your badge, it looks like it is a mostly crawler traffic. A simple fix we can apply forward is to just avoid counting when the crawler layout is being used.
