Want to keep your community members coming back for more? Create a system of ranks to create a sense of progression and status on your community, in order to encourage both new and old contributors to stay active. I wasn’t always so sure whether writing How To’s on inSpired was my bag. Then, one day, I received the unique rank ‘Product Guru’. Now I feel like I’ve got a reputation to live up to. Plus, maybe there’s a ‘Product God’ rank waiting for me somewhere...
How To Configure Ranks
- Go to Control > Users > Ranks > Add Rank.
- Add in the required details for your new rank: see the ‘List and explanation of Rank settings’ below for more information about each setting.
- Under ‘How to get this rank’, choose from the statistic-driven ‘Minimum value’ options or the role-based ‘Any of the following’/‘All of the following’ options.
- Under ‘What happens when you get this rank’, you can set up a custom private message to be sent to a member when they achieve a new rank (click here to learn more about this). You can also use ranks to trigger a new role for a member, or the removal of a role.
- Click ‘Save Changes’. Once you’ve added all the ranks you need, make sure you drag them into the correct order: from most complex (in terms of rules) at the top to least complex at the bottom.
- Finally, click ‘Rebuild’ - once you see the success message, your rank structure will be totally up to date!
Rank Setting Definitions:
- Name: only visible in Control (for internal use).
- Rank title: visible to all community members on the community frontend. Shown next to the member’s username, after the ‘Username icon’ (unless they change their settings so that their ‘user title’ is not shown).
- Title styling: optionally set this up to visually distinguish between ranks.
- Rank icon: shown at the bottom corner of the member’s avatar. Typically used to highlight special ranks for moderators and community managers. We currently support .png, .jpg, .jpeg, and .gif images for rank icons.
- Username icon: this is shown next to the member’s username.
Tips, Tricks, & Technical Bits
Ranks are applied from top to bottom. Make sure your ranks are ordered (in terms of rules) from most complex at the top, to least complex at the bottom. Otherwise, the more complex ranks will be overridden by the less complex ones.
If you ever make any changes to the configuration of ranks (reorder, add, edit, delete), you’ll need to hit ‘Rebuild’ to reflect these changes on your community. This recalculates ranks for members of your community, which may take a while if you have a significant number of members (e.g. over 50k).
‘Minimum age in seconds’ refers to the time in seconds since a user’s account was created, not since the user was born - inSided technology isn’t quite there...yet.
