I note that the Good Question (30) and Great Question (50) badges are available here on Area51
Given that posters are actively discouraged from "Voting Up" questions that have already got the requisite 10 votes (a Nice Question) what is the point of retaining these?
The fact that only one Great Question badge has been awarded seems to support my view?
Just interested...
The short answer is that the Area 51 software was derived from the main Stack Overflow Q&A engine. The core functionality was retained (wherever appropriate) to maintain as much of the user experience as possible. Some of the functionality (like the badges you cited) may not necessarily make sense in this system, but little work was expended to remove this functionality and we wanted to keep the functionality surprises to a minimum.
Adjusting your votes so that each Q did not exceed a threshold of 10 upvotes is not required. In fact, it's just a technique (pretty legal) to make your proposal grow faster.
However, there are really outstanding questions that are so good people can't withstand upvoting it.
P.S. Once awarded, badges are not withheld. So a certain question may get 30 upvotes and then the voters re-assign their votes to other questions. The badge will remain.
Given that posters are actively discouraged from "Voting Up" questions that have already got the requisite 10 votes (a Nice Question) what is the point of retaining these?
Such 'active discouraging' is nonconstructive, so the question should be, how to deal with such discouragers? The problem is, there's no vote do delete comment and flagging for moderator attention each time is for many users too hard reaction.
In my opinion, each proposal needs at least a few really good question, and not 40 average ones.
