Is there something weird going on with link-sharing counts?

Question

I've received an oddly-high number of Announcer badges over the past couple of days for links that I shared mostly years ago, most of them on Aviation.

I've earned 5 Announcer badges today alone on Aviation and then, later today, received a Booster badge for one of those same questions. It had to have been at least a couple of years ago when I shared that link. I also received a couple of Announcer badges from SuperUser and SpaceEx over the past day.

Are others here seeing the same thing? Is something odd going on with the link-sharing counts over the last couple of days?

Not that I'm complaining or anything, but this just seemed kind of odd and I was curious if others here were encountering the same thing.

Answer 1

Ah, I just now saw that a post went up on Meta.SO shortly before I posted this question (I did look there first, but missed it.)

Apparently link shares directly to answers weren't being counted properly before, according to this bug on Meta.SE. This was apparently fixed today, so the proper counts are showing up now and the newly-awarded badges are correct.

According to SE DBA Taryn,

The original queries the sharing badges, Announcer, Booster and Publicist, were supposed to count the total number of unique IP Addresses that visited from a link shared to a question.

In order to calculate this we would use the PostId from the link shared and join back to the Posts table to aggregate the total visits under each question. This process worked great for questions shared, but as you found out there was an issue when answers were shared. There was a bug that was introduced into the code during an earlier optimization that wasn't properly looking for the ParentId when an answer was shared. As a result, answers were not being included in the awarding of badges.