badge of contribution should be earn on a case by case basis, and provided by the staff (or suggested by other users) for good forum contribution and reliability.
I see lot of users trying to help in the wii/Wiiu section but providing wrong suggestions to other users (delete your HBC ! etc.)
Good users that people will know they can trust could be awarded some kind of badge. But having a badge because you know Wii hacking will not be very representative if a user from Vita section asks you questions.
People with old "knowledge badges" should lost them ? etc.
maybe it's too much work to setup and manage.
How would you solve the ageing/method flux problem? At one point I knew basically all there was to know about 360 modding, give or take hitachi drives which I knew enough to know to look things up and king kong which was dead anyway. Right now I still actually know/remember everything but some of the dates and firmware/dash version numbers for that, however I am rather more hazy on the newer stuff (I know RGH2 is a thing, what goes with what motherboard and dash/firmware is an entirely different matter).
Kind of the same story for the wii (to the point I would probably still plump for neogamma as my loader of choice), though it is less troublesome there as it was all pretty modular in the end.
3ds is similar again, however it has no games and poorer choices for homebrew than contemporary devices so I am happy to ignore that.
Those are all systems with system level hacks as well. Get something like the DS with its dozens of flash carts and where I might be at "reads
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm for fun" territory anybody that has read the FAQ for AKAIO would trounce me in setting up things for AKAIO, give or take the power of
https://xkcd.com/627/, which I suppose is not terribly applicable as I would not have it in front of me.
I once saw a phrase when dealing with data storage that ran something like what you knew 2 years ago is enough to hang you and what you knew 5 years ago makes you dangerous. 2 months and 5 months can be that for hacking.
I imagine as part of that you might seek objective people but you could have that to contend with. First pass would obviously have to be someone that has not earnestly said master race as it pertains to a hack before. That is also before how do you deal with anti cheat, anti online or anti piracy but still knows all what goes stuff.
I don't think I could prescribe a modding/fixing checklist either, it does not work for me when it comes to call centres and it does not work for me when it comes to device repair (at least in all what I see where people ultimately throw parts at things would could be fixed) and I certainly don't want to have to go imposing morals on people -- I am happy enough to see someone pirate, don't give a flying fuck about what you do in online play (I don't do it so no worries for me), probably won't help you do a run of repros and with play with cheats all day long.