Can gold badges be awarded during a site's beta period?

Question

Title kind of says it all. I notice that no gold badges have been awarded yet, and with some of the serious power users on this site, that seemed kind of strange.

Answer 1

Gold badges are hard to get, and I'd be surprised if anyone had got one by now. Where silver badges just take a volume of something, gold badges tend to take something particular.

For example, the easiest to get is Electorate, but that requires 600 question-votes (that doesn't including votes on answers) and that 25% or greater total votes are question-votes. The fastest way to get that is to vote on exactly 600 questions (up or down) and never vote on answers, which would take 20 days of very strange voting behaviour given the 30-vote daily cap. That's much harder to get than Civic Duty, which just takes voting a lot in general.

Copy Editor and Fanatic are probably the next easiest to get. Jeremiah and I only just got Strunk & White, and we're the most prolific copyeditors on the site so far. We're a long way from Copy Editor, which takes six times the edits. Fanatic takes 100 days, which is slightly longer than the beta period. That's probably the first gold badge that anyone will get.

If we had higher traffic, one of the "Great" and similar badges might be the easiest to get, but for now it's unlikely anyone will get 100 upvotes or 10,000 views on a question.

Answer 2

It's more than likely possible that the gold badges can be awarded, but no one has met the extraordinarily high requirements to earn one yet here.

A lot of this could be a matter of the site's relatively small size, user base, or activity level. The gold badges, by nature, require that the site they're earned from be fairly large and active.

Currently, the earnable gold badges are:

• Copy Editor: Edit 600 entries
• Electorate: Vote on 600 questions, and at least 25% of your total votes are on questions.
• Famous Question: Ask a question that gathers 10,000 views.
• Fanatic: Visit the site daily for 100 consecutive days.
• Great Answer: Have an answer score 100 or more.
• Great Question: Have a question score 100 or more.
• Legendary: Hit the daily reputation cap on 150 days.
• Populist: Have an answer out-score an accepted answer with a score of 10 or more, by more than double.
• Publicist: Share a link to a question, which is visited by 1,000 unique IPs in 5 days.
• Reversal: Provide an answer with +20 score to a question of -5 score.
• Stellar Question: Have a question favorited by 100 users.
• Unsung Hero: Have more than 10 zero-score accepted answers, which is more than 25% of your total answers.

Compare the above, to the following site stats (11/8/2010):

• 81 days in beta
  • Eliminates: Fanatic, Legendary
• 767 questions
  • Limits: Copy Editor, Electorate
• 126 avid users
  • Severely Limits: Great Answer, Great Question, Legendary, Stellar Question
• 908 total users
• 4.4 Answer/Question Ratio
• 467 visits/day
  • Severely Limits: Famous Question
  • Eliminates: Publicist

So, it's no surprise at all that nobody here has earned a Gold badge as of yet.

EDIT: It is now more apparent that it is indeed possible to get a Gold badge during a site's Beta period. We now have two members who have earned the "Fanatic" badge! Congratulations to SevenSidedDie and yhw42!