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Starting a new forums allows the administration to define their ranking models. The most common ranking system is just by counting the posts and the higher the number, the more epic the new rank should sound.
Are there any other ways to rank my members?
Ranking can be done in various ways.
One option, utilized by the Discourse forums, is "Trust Levels". As posted by the developers:
User trust levels are a way of...
- Sandboxing new users in your community so that they cannot accidentally (or intentionally!) hurt themselves, the forum, or other users while they are learning what to do.
- Granting experienced users more rights so that they can help maintain and moderate the community they generously contribute so much of their time to.
Advancement through these levels depends on several criteria being met:
Criteria for advancement increases and is designed to reward those users that are engaged and contributing to your community. While it does still depend on post count, it is not exclusive to post count. In fact, that particular measure is relatively easy to meet in an active community. It's the participation criteria that is important to gaining trust.
Other options include
Of course there are.
People are curious and like mystery. If you do not reveal the post count threshold nor the names of the upper rankings, people will discuss and think about them. They will start an own list (which you should allow) to write done their hypothesis of the rank names and the necessary post count.
Why just only have one ladder if you can five? Or maybe a six one nobody knows? If you have a game series forum you can take for example the factions of your game series and ask people after a while to join a faction. Then they can reach the ranks of their faction and only their faction. So everyone can have their own ranking ladder. If someone joins no faction ever, they could be auto-join an other faction and gain theirs ranks. Unexpected, huh?
Maybe users in your forums grease other posts. You could count the total numbers of greases and then their ranking grows. Or you take the average online time in your forum.
Rankings based on number of posts encourage spam and low-quality posts to inflate the number, but they can be useful for determining engagement.
Coherent ranking systems usually use some type of voting system and may also take into account the amount of time a user spends on a particular site.
