How these earned badges are possible?

Question

Almost any silver or gold badge results in getting a bronze badge before it (in the middle of the way). For example, a question with 20 up-votes get the nice question silver badge, which means that when it's got to 10 up-votes, it's given the good question bronze badge.

Why this person (the image) in spite of having 92 silver badge and 13 gold badge, only has 21 bronze badge? Is this a bug? What is the explanation behind it?

Answer 1

Are you looking at Pierre 303?

If I look at one of Pierre's posts, I see the following which seems to match your partial image:

It looks like there's too much text on that line that it is getting pushed out of view.

However, if I look at the users page then the full count is visible, 212 not 21.

Answer 2

Pierre 303 actually has 212 bronze badges, not 21.

But there are actually several badges that do not have bronze equivalents:

• Archaeologist: Edited 100 posts that were inactive for 6 months.
• Beta: Actively participated in the private beta.
• Enlightened: First to answer and accepted with at least 10 upvotes. This badge can be awarded multiple times.
• Enthusiast: Visited the site each day for 30 consecutive days.
• Favorite Question: Question favorited by 25 users. This badge can be awarded multiple times.
• Generalist: Provided non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of top 40 tags.
• Guru: Accepted answer and score of 40 or more. This badge can be awarded multiple times.
• Sportsmanship: Up voted 100 competing answers.
• Tenacious: Zero score accepted answers: more than 5 and 20% of total.

So it's technically possible to have more silver than copper, and in certain cases—namely when you have a lot of first accepted answers or when your questions are favorited a lot—it's possible for silver to outpace copper, but that's pretty rare (so rare I've never seen it happen).