Incidentally, deleted answers don't count for that purpose (as I see since I deleted my first answer and Barton Reid appropriately received a badge for his answer). This has the following implication: if you post a really bad answer first, and realize it, it makes sense to delete it so that a different person will have an opportunity to get a silver badge.

I think it's a bit early to second-guess what hiring committees will think of MO! And if you look at the speed with which Terry Tao has gone up the reputation scale, then I think we'll all be hard put to stay even in the same order of magnitude as him once MO has been around half a year or so. I've already dismissed keeping up with the likes of Ben Webster or you and am making my personal goal simply keeping ahead of Scott Morrison.

But the point I'm trying to make is that suppose some hiring committee looks into my Math Overflow reputation, and they decide to look at the list of users. Now one of them says: "Aha! We should probably try to get people who don't have many silver badges. That Ilya Nikokoshev probably only got them because he has spent too much time on the site while Terry Tao was busy writing his blog posts and posting arXiv articles -- we should get someone like that. By the way, that profile of Andrew Stacey is interesting..."

See, what I mean?

Now I think it kind of doesn't make sense to pursue badges if people who so much stronger than me don't have ones: any reasonable observer will immediately notice the situation and will come to the conclusion that badges don't correlate with math strength.

By the way, you should have gotten the Citizen Patrol badge for flagging a post as spam, but it looks like there's a bug, making it so that the badge is only awarded for flagging as offensive (or there is a very long delay in the badge being awarded). I've updated a bug report I posted at meta.SE on this issue.

Note that the community user locks and deletes the post. Locking is to prevent the offending user from undeleting.

Presumably there's some way to actually delete these posts since the purpose is to get links back to the other website and thus raise their page rank, so merely voting down is not enough.

More generally, are all off-site links automatically marked "nofollow"? If not, they should be.