Hi all,
I just wanted to take a moment to come in here and explain a little about ranks, accepted solutions etc.
First off, if you have not already, please read the recent rank update published by my colleague @Cecilia_Bergstedt. It does a good job of explaining the new rank structure and, at a high level, how it works.
Ranks, badges etc are a common facet of modern online communities, they are used to recognize your participation in the community and, for some, to encourage continued participation. Of course for some people they don't care what rank or badge they have and thats fine, this system is built for those that want this recognition.
Allot of work goes into building out a gamification system, which badging and ranking are parts of, because you want to genuinely recognize the people who come in and answer questions or even just ask great questions to develop community understanding of a product, service or problem. When we build it we think about what behaviours do we want to recognise or reward, are there any we want to discourage, can we give extra permissions as we get to know a given user or is there things we want to stop users doing or having to do at certain ranks?
The goal is always to foster a healthy, vibrant and expanding community for all its members. As mentioned by both @EricStarker and @Cecilia_Bergstedt there are many metrics used to help define the ranks from new posts, replies, likes (both given and received) and accepted solutions to name but a few. Some ranks are really simple, like MVP or Employee when the only qualifying criteria to get it is to be awared a role. Some ranks have a significantly more complex set of metrics that make up how you earn it.
In the interests of being open, I am going to share with you once of our ranking formula here, and break it down.
Rank Formula for Platinum contributor, one of our higher ranks:
(registrationAge >= 165000) && ((net_threads) + (net_replies*2) + (net_blog_articles*10) + (net_blog_comments*1) + (net_idea_threads*5) + (net_idea_comments) + (net_contributed_posts*10) + (net_published_tkb_articles*10) + (net_tkb_comments) + (net_accepted_solutions*15) + (net_kudos_events_given*2) + (kudos_events_received*4) >= 30000) || (arbitrary_points >=30000)
So lets walk through this one, to get this rank a user must have:
Registration Age (the time from when they registered to now) of at least 165000 minutes (or just shy of 120 days)
AND (thats what the && means)
The total number of topics started, less any deleted
added to the to total number of replies, less any deleted, multiplied by 2.
added to the total number of blog articles written, less any deleted, muliplied by 10
adding to the total number of comments, less any deleted, muliplied by 1
added to the total number of ideas submitted multiplied by 5
added to the total number of comments on ideas
added to the total number of Kb Articles, multiplied by 10
added to the comments on any KB articles
added to the totaly number of solutions accepted, multiplied by 15
added to the number of likes give, multipled by 2
added to the number of likes received, multiplied by 4
equals 30000 points or more
OR (thats what the || means)
The user has been given arbitary points of 30000 by an admin (usually when a user migrates from an old account to a new account.
Phew, thats allot of math, keep in mind @Cecilia_Bergstedt and the team that worked on this then had to repeat this for the 25 different ranks we have today to prevent overlaps or areas where a user might get stuck. Some are much simpler than this one, others have allot more to them.
So why have the multipliers?
Well, we attribute a point multiplier to recognize different behaviours we want to encourage in the community. These usually center around starting an engagement (forum post, creating a blog or kb article or submitting an idea) or replying to an engagements in the form of comments or likes.
Why do blogs, kbs get such significant multipliers?
As many of you will know for the most part blogs and kbs are written in the community by employees and so we lift them out of the ranking structure as that would be unfair and for the very few occasions we do get guest authors to participate in a blog or a kb article. When we do have guest authors in recognition of the time taken to write that one article or kb and the value we hope that content will bring to the community its only write we acknologe that work appropriately in the rank structure. Its also worth noting that accepted solutions gets a higher multiplier than any other single activity in our rank structure.
Why are accepted solutions so important?
To help users fine answered questions, at its most simpliest level. Both the community search and Search engines look for posts that have been answered to help provide the structured data so that when you ask a question in Bing or Google a solution is presented without the user even having to visit the community site.
I saw in this thread @A1-A1 suggestion that we should make users accept solutions, but how would we actually do that?
At the end of the day we can't force anyone to do anything, except maybe if they break our terms of use and then we can ban them. So what we do instead is we incentivice users to accept solutions, using the points system and we email a user after they have had a reply and ask them if their question was answered and if so give them a link to mark the solution in their question.
We also give some users the ability to accept solutions on behalf of the original author, however we also want to make sure we have control over who can do that and under what circumstances. Primarily to ensure the user is given appropriate time choose thier own solution and confirm it worked for them but also to prevent abuse or gamification of the ranking system.
Caching of ranks
I saw that there was some discussion around the caching of ranks and potential issues caused by that. There is no caching of ranks or metrics on the Microsoft Tech Community. Its possible that you might get demoted a rank if you create a post that later gets marked as spam, correctly or incorrectly, but this will only happen when you are at the boundry of one of the ranks. If you encounter Any discrepancies like this then do feel free to let us know, we will be happy to look into it.
Limits of ranks
The biggest limit we have today is that the rank you get here in the Microsoft Tech Community is only based on your participation here in the Microsoft Tech Community, as many of you will now Microsoft has many communities. One of the discussions we are having right now is how in the longer term do we potentially share profile information between the Microsoft Communities to show a 'cross community' rank or score for your partipation globally in the Microsoft Community spaces. Unfortunately at this time I have nothing share about this but I wanted to let you know we are aware of and thinking about how we might address this.
I hope this explains a little bit more about why we do ranking and badging a little bit about how it fits into life at Microsoft Tech Community. As a user you are free to use the ranking structure or not to measure your personal goals in the Microsoft Tech Community. Of course, and please consider this a very gentle reminder, what must always be true for all users: if your a new user who came in yesterday, a viewer who joined us 6 years ago making your first post to day or if you are someone who posts every single day we expect all users to respect each others views and keep conversations constructive at all times.
if you have questions, I am happy to answer them below - please do keep in mind that I may not always be able to answer right away.
