Edit: This seems to be a network-wide issue. See: Meta Stackexchange
A few minutes ago a got a notification that I received an Excavator badge. This was kinda puzzling, because I already had one. Shortly after I received yet another one, which made me open the acoording badge page. It appears that this badge is awarded repeatedly to random users.
This goes on for 12 pages. Some people are also getting Marshal badges.
We just did a major revamp of how badges are awarded behind the scenes to drastically reduce the load on SQL Server. It now takes advantage of some pre-compute work we're doing to track badge progress in the profile.
However, I screwed up 2 queries, specifically the text names of the badges that prevent duplicate awarding. I was thinking to myself earlier "hey, maybe we should pass these in" as part of the rewrite - but it's not quite so simple. I'll take another look at this soon but when we're not fighting fires from a SQL Server upgrade. The cardinality changes which hosed some of the bigger badge queries needed urgent attention here, which ended up as a major revamp and introduced the 2 errors reported here.
-- Nick Craver
SE is currently experiencing some sort of badge-related issues. It is being worked on by the developers.
