The concept of badges is a good one on the psychological level. We get to earn something and other people get to see it. In essence while we aren't necessarily bragging... we are.

I like badges. I wish I had more and higher ones but I was stuck with a very slow and old computer system until more recently and I have definitely made up for that in the matter of a few months. More importantly, however, I wish I had been able to complete more work but not for the badges. I just wish I could have contributed more and now I'm trying to make up for lost time.

Having badges for individual projects is great but I do also support badges that go beyond just bronze/silver/gold. I definitely believe awards should exist for the number of years crunched and other milestones.

Badges may seem trivial and childish to some people but they do give some people a motivation to keep doing this and while that may seem utterly silly the fact is that the badges are so easy to create while the work done by all the people doing the computing may contain invaluable data for whatever the focus of any given project is.

Badges cost nothing but the results of the work processed by the millions of people involved is simply priceless. If a badge strokes someone's ego enough to make them keep donating CPU time then give them badges!

I run BOINC on my quad-core system and give it up to 95% of all 4 cores. It's always running except when my system is shutdown or I'm doing work that would suffer from BOINC also running. My goal is to make a positive difference which I believe is the same with many other people.

I'm working my way to a silver... 69 results and 32 days worth of work. :D

and the 365 core processor would cost you more to buy. Why should a used $99 PIII get the same credit as a new expensive Quad? Not Fair!!!

The donation for projects is the best recognance and award that we could have but more levels of badge will probably be need in near future to keep many crunchers plugged on WCG projects.

Additionally I think that the discussions about new badges pass through other discussion like what the best rule need be used by WCG to distribute and promote badges, what the best statitistic or set of statistics will be better... and so on

Personally time statistics (days of crunch for each project) is not my favorite once bring many errors about the effort level of each people.
Probably was adequate when just single cores are away until few years ago.

For instance one guy with a Quad core machine will crunch more WU's and probably fast than other with a Duo or single processors machines (if we compare machine by machine and not the quantity of machines) and probably will spent less time to process a lot of WU's compared with other people that do not have a Quad.

In this case, time statistics to get badges count against this individual with a Quad, in terms of criteria once your fast machine will spent less time to make much more contribution than other (despite of crunch much more WU's and get same advantage on that).

Another view could be that combined statistics like time donated and results returned appear be a more equity way to promote badges.

Maybe credits will be the best way but it need have more deep discussions and considerations about once there are some things that non make sense for me like the WCG rules which in general do not distribute the same quantity of points or credits for invalid results (this results spent equal time to be crunch that valids ones and really help techs and scientists to fit and put the projects in right ways manytimes after its evaluations and analysis).

Just ideas to think about...

I can't answer your question but I started on the SETI@Home project many years ago. I moved on to United Devices because I found the research more important on a personal level.

Even back during the old SETI@Home days they gave out certificates for work unit milestones.

Personally, if they did away with badges I would still be crunching. I could live without them but some people grow bored of things after awhile and not all people will continue to crunch WUs. I know people who have stopped. I don't get the logic in that, personally.

If badges keep people crunching WUs which ultimately benefit projects and those projects ultimate benefit science then I think badges are a good thing.

Ding! Gold (on NNW). Still working on CEP.