There are often delays in awarding badges. That's fine, but the lag in awarding a badge can sometimes be short and sometimes be long, for no reason that I can discern. Some examples:

1) A week or so ago I went on a "characteristic-p" tagging spree. When I stopped, I noticed that there were then 50 char-p tags. So I thought I was entitled to the taxonomist badge. And I was, but this was not awarded until more than 24 hours later.

2) Earlier this afternoon I answered a group theory question. My answer was the first and thus far only one, and was quickly accepted. About an hour ago it hit 10 upvotes and within minutes after that I received the "Nice Answer" badge. But more than half an hour later, the "Enlightened" badge still hasn't shown up. So the system doesn't check for these two badges at the same time?? It's strange.

3) A while ago I thought it was suspicious that no one had been awarded the Fanatic badge. I was pretty sure that I had logged in 100 consecutive days on the site, but not completely sure. However, that none of Anton Geraschenko, Scott Morrison, Ben Webster, etc. had logged on 100 consecutive days seemed beyond the realm of reasonable doubt. And it was -- as we found out more recently, there was some mistake in the awarding of that badge which was fixed in an update, resulting in a string of fanatic badges being awarded after the fact.

Does anyone understand these delays and why they occur? Do we have some reason to believe that the badges are now being awarded correctly?

By the way, a good check on the system would be the ability for any user to click on an option to keep track of what the system is supposed to be keeping track of -- e.g. number of edited answers, consecutive days logged in, etc.

I've noticed it, but I don't think that it really matters. I think it's related to the little orange "you have responses" envelope lagging, but I'm not positive.

I don't know about the details of when the badge commands are run, so this might be a fun question for meta.SE. As for users making sure that badges are being awarded correctly, it seems like it would be a pain to implement, and I worry that it might have more of a negative effect than a positive one. You can always test the most recent database dump to see if all badges were awarded correctly. If you're not sure if your interpretation of the badge is correct, I'd be happy to give you the exact command that is run to award the badge (I can get it from the full database dump). As an example, the command for "Nice Answer" is

select x.UserId, x.ItemCount, y.BadgeCount from /* list number of answers with 
score > 10 */ (select max(p.OwnerUserId) UserId, count(*) ItemCount from Posts p
with (nolock) where p.PostTypeId = 2 and p.DeletionDate is null and (p.Score >= 10)
group by p.OwnerUserId) x left outer join /* list number of badges of this type for
all users */ (select max(u2b.UserId) UserId, count(*) BadgeCount from Users2Badges
u2b with (nolock) inner join Badges b on u2b.BadgeId = b.Id where b.Name = 'Nice
Answer' group by u2b.UserId, u2b.BadgeId) y on x.UserId = y.UserId /* only award
new badges if the matching items outnumber the current badge count */ where
(ItemCount > BadgeCount or BadgeCount is null)