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for example this user https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/badges/44/necromancer?userid=16337 had got the necromancer badge today as a question was merged with the one which was older than 60 days. i.e How do people read big technical books? Does this mean every one who gets up voted above 5 votes automatically earns this badge? . IMHO the actual badge description makes this a rare and a relatively hard badge to earn.

Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more

And it is to be earned by the user when he resurrects an old question by answering it or by editing an existing old answer.

Merged Questions Do not consider the Effort Portion of the user in answering a 60 days old question as this is already done implicitly by merging.

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This has come up on Meta Stack Overflow, so it's a known issue. Personally, I think they technically did meet the requirements of the badge, even if they didn't realize it: by virtue of the merge, they answered a question more than 60 days old and received a score of 5 or higher.

Some badges are easy to game, this isn't the only way one can game the Necromancer badge, and merging certainly isn't the easiest way to acquire it:

  1. answer a question that's an exact duplicate of an earlier question,
  2. get people to only add answers that would be equally applicable to the earlier question, then
  3. convince a moderator to merge the new question with the old one.

So my advice would be to not worry about it.

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  • @Thanks for the dupe and good answer :)
    – Aditya P
    Apr 23, 2011 at 20:05
  • This question is a possible duplicate...:)
    – Michael K
    Apr 26, 2011 at 17:41

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