I have added two new user profile badges to the site today, and from the looks of it quite a lot of you qualify for them and should find them on your forum profile this morning.
Software Tester badges are awarded to community members who have used the SCL's "Compatibility" tab to report whether or not an piece of software worked, worked partially or did not work at all on your device
(s
).
Hardware Tester badges are awarded to members who similarly use the Device Compatibility form in the HCL to report whether or not a piece of hardware worked on your device
(s
).
The recent "de listing" problem from Google has led me to look in more detail at why certain things like the SCL just aren't appearing on Google at all. Part of the issue might be that pages are too similar to each other, so if you know something works
(or doesn't
), please spend a few moments to let the system know as this adds to the variability and worth of the page content and should lead Google and others to actually index it.
At the current time, with the SCL for example. Google specifically stated that 92% of the SCL's entire content is "crawled but not indexed".
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discovered-currently-not-indexed-help-26697.html suggests that the issue is, as indicated above, due to content similarity.
Both badges are cumulative, so the more compatibility you submit, the more you will be rewarded with. It doesn't matter whether it worked or not, just that you submitted it - but for the benefit of the community, please keep your submissions honest and true!
I've had the system award all historic badges too, so if you have submitted HCL or SCL compatibility reports in the past, you should now find the badge awarded on your profile.
