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.
I noticed that all three posts, which I got the badge for, are posts which I linked to in other posts here on Meta. (For example, I linked to UPDATE: Cloudflare outage! - Discourse update to "3.5.0.beta6" failed - #2 by haydenjames in I tried to rebuild but I can't finish cause this error - #2 by Moin). But I wouldn’t expect clicks on that to result in the badge, because users clicking a link here on Meta aren’t “outside visitors”, would they? At least that’s how I understood the check for the host in the incoming link model.
I also noticed this pattern on other posts for which users received the badge recently. For example, Tobias got a badge for sharing 🇩🇪 Fehler in der Deutschen Übersetzung? Hier melden! - #108 by Moin in September. Of course, I don’t know if he shared that somewhere else. I can clearly tell that he linked to it in 🇩🇪 Fehler in der Deutschen Übersetzung? Hier melden! - #108 by Moin because there is the backlink below my post. But of course I cannot know if the users shared those links also somewhere else.
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.