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Hi everyone,

Some of you might have noticed something new in our community recently.  We have completely redesigned our ranks system, and that means that you will now have a new rank connected to your member profile.

In case you’re wondering what a rank is, it’s a ladder that you can rise up in the community through participation.  It’s a badge of honor for those who contribute to the community, and it helps everyone quickly get a sense of which members are the true experts.  You’ll know when you get a new rank as we’ll send you a nice message about it.  

 

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Ranks are based on thresholds that you reach through joining and participating in the community.  We won’t share the precise thresholds and data points behind our system, but here is a quick explanation of the titles and what they signify:

  • Explorer. Everyone starts in the Explorer ranks (from ⭐️ to ⭐️⭐️⭐️), which are for members who have joined the community and potentially re-visited several times, but have not participated by creating a topic or a reply.
  • Contributor. The Contributor ranks (from ⭐️ to ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) are for members who are actively participating by contributing content in the community to various degrees.  
  • Helper.  The Helper ranks (from ⭐️ to ⭐️⭐️⭐️) are for those who have started actively helping other community members.  Hint: When one of your replies gets marked as the best answer to a question, there’s no doubt that you’ve been very helpful!
  • Expert.  The Expert ranks (from ⭐️ to ⭐️⭐️⭐️) are for our elite members who have been highly active and helpful for an extended period of time.  If you get a reply from one of our Experts you can be sure that you’re talking to one of our most knowledgeable members.
  • VIP.  You might also see that a few of our members have a VIP rank (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️).  This signifies that they’re one of our absolute top-tier members and that they have access to our exclusive invite-only VIP area.

We hope you enjoy our new ranks system!  We will be reviewing and updating it roughly every six months, and we already have ideas for optimizing it further.  In the meantime, if you have questions or feedback just let us know.

 

 

Curious about a couple things:

What do the stars represent, and why do some tiers go up to 5 stars while others only 3?

Also, know what distinguishes Expert from VIP beyond simply “absolute top-tier member” with “access to our exclusive invite-only VIP area”?

Not for myself, bc I couldn’t care less - but surprised to see some long time “heavy hitters” like  @gunjanm and @bradley aren’t labeled as such.

Hi @darkknight - the stars represent sub-levels within each of the segments.  It’s a way for us to have more levels without an insane number of different rank titles to make sense of (our previous structure suffered from this). 

You raise a great point about some going to 5 and some going to 3.  I’m still in doubt about this and we might change it.  We went with five stars for the Contributor ranks simply because there’s a broad range there and a lot of members will fall into those categories, so we wanted to spread the ranks out a little without creating another segment.  But to your point, it does still bug me a little that it’s inconsistent and we might switch it to a 1-3 star structure for all ranks in our next review. 

The Expert ranks are driven by data points, while the VIP rank is invite-only.  The VIP area was initiated very recently, initially as part of the UAT testing phase when we were launching the merged community (combining with CC) in December.  It’s a fledgling program and we are still working on it - it’s a small group and indeed doesn’t yet include all of our heavy hitters.  

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