Ranks

Hi all,

We are currently considering refreshing the community rank structure and making it clearer what rank community members have. 

Presently our ranks are made up of the following 'generic' user types:

• Members / Visitors
  Typically, users with this rank have joined the community, visited a few times and maybe read a few articles but that is the limit of their participation
• Contributors
  This overly broad range of users is everything from someone who has commented on at least two posts / started two conversations all the way up to our honored contributor who must have reached (btw this is also why previously we have not shared this information, it's not a straightforward as you might imagine):
  • (posts - deleted posts) + ideas >= 8000
  • Been a member for at least 208 days
  • Likes received + (accepted solutions * 10) >= 1500
  • Has been given admin points totaling 300 or more
• Employees
• MVPs
• Community Managers

Now we are going to leave out Employees, MVPs and Community Managers, at least for now. but my broad stroke idea is to make the rank names marry up closer to user activity i.e. 

• New Members (Users who have just joined and not really done anything)
• Visitors (Users who have been a member over two weeks who have visited at least twice and only read pages)
• Praisers (per visitors + have given at least 1 like to a post or user)
• Conversation starters ( per visitors + praisers and also have started at least one new topic)
• Knowledge sharers ( per visitors, praisers, conversations starters and have replied at least once)
• Experts (per visitors, praisers, conversation starters, knowledge sharers and have at least 10 Accepted solutions)

Now all these broad strokes are still to be defined (i.e. exactly what each level in each rank will be) but I would like to ask the community what the rank names for all these roles should be. Now keep in mind we can't use names that are trademarks or copyrighted to anyone else, so everyone thinking of their favorite superhero cartoon.. forget it that is a definite no!!

Unfortunately, the current rank engine doesn't let us target specific communities either so we can't have Excel Expert etc.. 

In 1 week - on Monday, 28th Feb - we will create a shortlist poll of the names we can proceed with and ask you all to vote for your favorite. I am hoping by then I will be able to better define how many levels will be present in each rank as well. 

To be clear, there is no prize for the winner and names will be accepted and shortlisted purely at our Team's discretion. 

To get you started here are some very simple ones we have considered:

• New Member
• Visitor
• Supporter
• Conversationalist
• Knowlegable
• Expert

We have also considered using the same rank structure that is used in other Microsoft Communities, i.e.
Power Users & Power BI

Power Users Ranks

As we are larger than these communities, we may need to tweak some of the thresholds of these ranks and our concern was you all might find it confusing if you had a different rank in each community. 

Or convert activities into points and use a levels system like the Microsoft Rewards team do, although this would be much more complicated to ensure progression through the levels at a reasonable rate.

Hope this gets your creative juices flowing.