Please consider adding user ranks

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1

I know Discourse has built-in trust levels. In my opinion, there are several issues with them.

  1. Trust level doesn’t take into account previous history, despite preserved post count and registration date. Everyone is a basic user except for moderators.
  2. It takes too much work to see this level. Currently the only way to see anything about a user requires two clicks: one on the profile picture, then again. The profile then shows statistics and trust level.
  3. You have to be logged in to view this.
  4. The number of levels is somewhat low, basically, just three (not counting “leader” that can be only assigned by staff). This item is debatable, maybe three is all we need.
  5. The algorithm behind the built-in trust levels is not appropriate for a technical forum such as this. For example, to maintain level 3 “regular”, one has to post 50% days in the last 100 days. There are a lot very respected and knowledgeable members here (no, I’m not one of them) that have been around for decades. I’m sure many of them are busy professionals that may visit the forum sporadically. There are additional requirements for read posts too.

Why do we care in the first place? I think it’s helpful to see who is asking the question or who is answering it. Frequent visitors probably know those knowledgeable members anyway, but for new users (and I was one of them several years ago) this is the only thing, besides common sense, they can rely upon when taking advice from the proverbial “random Internet person”.

I also think ranking acknowledges the efforts and time that members put into this forum.

At the very least, the current ranks and post counts should be visible along the user profile on every post, without having to explore user’s profile. But it would be better to have something more. Maybe you could get creative and come up with some “networking slang” or “MikroTik slang” ranks (please don’t get too creative :smiley:).

There are several Discourse-based forums that do everything or some of what I’m suggesting above. Examples:

World of Warcraft

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Spiceworks

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Anker has just levels but the idea is to display them right there. I also like the full timestamp—must be doable with Discourse.

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2

Instead of ranks there should be other metrics used.

According to this https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-scores-for-reactions/275731/3 it should be possible to create awards based on reaction count.

3

Yep, but that would be mostly a measure of popularity.

The old method (that BTW was a proxy for seniority/constant involvement) showing the number of posts is much more reliable.

4

User with most solved marked posts. That would be a great measure.

5

You don’t want to know how many solutions do not get that Solved marking …

6

I know.

7

Incentive to encourage, for some, perhaps… Now, thankfully, MikroTik has hidden many of the annoying “everyone gets a blue ribbon” ones like “First Post”, “First Like” badges.

Although I think some “moderator” level person should be able to mark a topic as solved, in addition to just the user. Ideally with user ability to “Unsolve” - although OP posting some variant of “WTF” clarifies any wrongly classified solved.

8

I have such config in place atm. MikroTik staff users and community-moderators can set solved for topics.

9

Checking those plugins in test env. But having some issues with them. Will update later if managed to solve the problems or no.