💬 We want to hear from you! Community ranks and recognition feedback

[Lauren_vdv]

Hi everyone!

We’re planning to refresh the Community rank structure, but before moving forward, we wanted to make sure we heard from you. This is after all, your Community so we want to prioritize your voice and perspective with any changes that are made. 

Ranks today

Today, Community ranks consist of both earned and assigned ranks. The earned ranks are based on activity and contributions to the Community, whereas assigned ranks live outside the earned rank structure and are based on a certain role or set of permissions the member holds, such as “Community Manager,” “Staff,” or “Google Developer Expert.” 

Ranks are visible throughout the Community, particularly on your profile page and when you engage in the Community with posts, comments, and events. 

Earned ranks are currently as follows, beginning with “New Member” and progressing to “Participant V.”  

• New Member
• Community Visitor
• Observer
• Explorer
• Participant I
• Participant II
• Participant III
• Participant IV
• Participant V

Badges work in parallel with ranks and are currently awarded based on incremental achievements in the Community, including number of posts, accepted solutions, ideas, comments, and likes received. Badges earned are visible from each member’s profile page.

Reasons for change

Community ranks and badges can help serve a number of purposes, including:

• Encourages and rewards quality contributions

• Indicates level of engagement and expertise, which can help others know how to best respond and communicate with each other

• Helps establish credibility and visibility as a leader

• Brings an element of gamification that helps make Community fun!

We believe our current rank structure can be improved to better meet each of the purposes above. We have some ideas on how to do this, but we want to hear from you… 

What do you think?

Please share your thoughts on one or a few of the questions below. This will be tremendously helpful in ensuring any changes we make are aligned to your wants and needs. 

Of course, free form responses that don’t necessarily relate to a specific question are welcome as well! 

• What do you like or what do you think could be improved about our existing Community ranks and recognition program (i.e. ranks, badges, gamification)?

• What would help motivate you to participate in community activities that help uplevel your rank? (e.g. extrinsic motivators like swag, and/or intrinsic motivators like being helpful and receiving thanks and recognition, or a combination of both)

• If you were to come up with your own rank names for the Google Cloud Community, what would they be? (e.g. member, visitor, contributor, leader, legend, etc.)

• Are there other rank/badge programs you’ve seen or been a part of? What are they and what do you like or dislike about them? 

• Would you be interested in participating in activities such as speaking at a community event, joining a Q&A panel, authoring a community blog, being featured in a member spotlight, etc.?

[Lauren_vdv]

What do you think? @Steve @graham_howe @WillowMobileSys @Joseph_Seddik @Marc_Dillon 

We'd love to hear from you! 

[SkrOYC]

I'm clearly with a foot out of the community so I guess I'm not invited 😂

Just kidding

[Lauren_vdv]

You're definitely invited @SkrOYC 😊 We'd love to hear from you!

[WillowMobileSys]

Hi Lauren!  Thank you for all you do to make this Community better.

A Distinction

First, I think it's important to make the distinction between contributions to the Community versus experience in AppSheet itself. The two are not directly related.

The forum ranking systems, any ranking systems, are really designed to measure a person's overall interaction within the community.  Obviously, as a person reaches higher ranks it can be inferred they are more knowledgeable about the subject content - AppSheet in our case.  But how knowledgeable are they really?  Being wildly active in the Community does NOT directly correlate to knowledge of AppSheet.

What do I think could be improved about our existing Community ranks?

1)  If we consider Gaming ranks for a second, a person must actively play the game in order to increase in rank.  This has a direct correlation to their level of experience in the game. 

Of course, measuring a person's knowledge in AppSheet, or any forum subject matter, is not easy.  How that could be done, I'll leave to a targeted discussion.   But...I would like to see some way to acquire that measure and then combine the two - level of contributions to the Community + experience/knowledge in AppSheet - into the ranking system.

2) I think the biggest challenge currently is knowing where in the hierarchy a rank lives. Named ranks are really not very helpful in this regard.  Combining them with some visual indicator would be better - maybe a progress bar or progress circle kind-a-thingy. 😎

How to motivate participation in the community?

As others have said, I don't really care much about the rank I have or receiving recognition in the way of likes.   Nor do I want more "stuff" - I'm trying to purge what I have now!

What if real value was provided?  Such as a points system, like many card companies do, and allow those points to be used like cash.  Maybe to put towards license costs.  Or maybe towards swag of their choosing - for those that like that.

[dbaum]

Echo "I think the biggest challenge currently is knowing where in the hierarchy a rank lives." I'm new here over last few days, and it took me a while to infer the many solutions I was referencing from "Participant V" members were from the most active people. Initially, it didn't even occur to me that "V" represented a number--I assumed it was an initial.

[SkrOYC]

I'm just going to give a little feedback.

The ranking doesn't make sense today on this forum (community is just too much at this point).

I'm not the only one that thinks that, I think that the actual raking method was not prepared for the people behind the AppSheet community.

The way Discourse handled it was great, and in general it asked the users to read and visit the community on a day by day basis in order to get certain badges and ranks.

The names used to describe a user/member are not necesary bad, but the way it's handled on the backend to decide wich rank people is on make it useless today.

So, IMHO:

Anyone with less than 6 months of experience inside the community should always be on one of the following:

• New Member
• Community Visitor
• Observer
• Explorer

The difference between them can be based on different criteria like the time spent, post read, solutions, etc. At the same time, 6 months is an estimate, but can be used to make the criteria using statistics. EG.: you can check the average total time spend, post read, solutions... users get on their first 6 months.

After that Participant I to V should be based on almost the same thing but with a bigger difficulty rate.

What I mean by that is that we should have like 10-20 Participants V on the whole forum, where @Steve, @Marc_Dillon, @WillowMobileSys, @Koichi_Tsuji, @Suvrutt_Gurjar  and @MultiTech are clearly on that list.

On the same route, in my case, I think that any user with less than 2.000 post and 2.000 likes received should be around Participant III, like me and @Joseph_Seddik.

You get the idea.

A better explanation of a good ranking can also be found here

Really, it's a good one.

The idea behind this is that we should be able to understand really fast how experience someone is and at the same time we should know if we should trust or think it twice before following suggestions/replies/comments

[Lauren_vdv]

Really appreciate this feedback @SkrOYC! 

[SkrOYC]

I think that Participant X could be given to @Steve considering his numbers 😂

Even the amount of likes received from Steve can be a measure by it's own

[graham_howe]

Honestly I have zero interest in what my ranking is, I consider myself a noob (and certainly fall under @SkrOYC 6 month criteria). If I can answer a question, usually because of 30+ years in IT rather than AppSheet expertise, then I will. If someone isn't interested in the suggestion because of my 'rank' well then that's up to them, but I'm not motivated by where I am on a leader board.

[SkrOYC]

This is a quite valid POV also, there is experience on other fields that is not going to be shown as a rank here but is quite possitive and helpful.

Also the 6 months is just an example. I just wanted to point to the fact that the actual ranking system is useless and can be better if it's based on other statistics (better yet, an open and known system)

I also feel the same as you about what my rank says, since we do the best we can to help no matter the rank.

But it's helpful for others to know who has proven to be trustfull here after a while

[Joseph_Seddik]

Thanks @Lauren_vdv, sorry I planned to reply later, but not to miss the momentum, I'll provide my humble input now. 

First and foremost, thank you for deciding to take the input of Community members before introducing the change; this is quite awesome!

Now here's what I think about it, and FWIW what I'm about to say will be heavily influenced by my own experience and background of 25+ years in the telecommunications industry:

1. What is the goal of a member ranking system?

This should go inline with the goals of having a Community. There can be several, but relating to my product management experience, the most important role is to be part of the product strategy, in terms of:

1. providing a strong support base complementing the official documentation, lowering the entry barrier, expanding use cases to cover almost every industry segment, and maximizing the user base, and
   
   
2. for the product engineering to get crucial feedback for crafting the product's roadmap. 

These terms are achieved when:

1. Community readers are able to correctly identify the Quality of posts based on the  Ranking of the corresponding authors; so that:
   • AppSheet users could readily find the most precise answers to their questions, the most relevant solutions for their problems, and the most useful advice to preemptively avoid future problems in their apps.  
     
     
   • Similarly AppSheet engineering could easily identify the right feedback so that they make the right decisions regarding the product's roadmap. 
     
     
2. And yes, Community contributors are incentivized to write Quality posts, through the same system of Ranking and badges. 
   
   

I'm not sure what would constitute an effective motivation mechanisms (badges and such) that would get it right for a large number of people of different backgrounds and personal goals. I don't feel qualified to provide input in this regard, so at the end I will speak only about myself. If I were to say something here, I'd say for Ranking to be use as an incentive, it could be useful, I think, to have it changing in both directions, meaning it could increase or decrease, so the motivation remains alive. 

Nevertheless, I do feel humbly qualified to provide input regarding how to rate or provide grading for Posts Quality, and subsequently an Author Ranking. 

2. How to assign Ranking to Community contributors?

As explained, Quality rather than Quantity should be the main factor in determining Ranking. It should never be a question of how old or how many, rather how good. This is our main principle.

For example, we have a number of contributors who keep posting duplicate questions, sometimes changing the wording and sometimes just copy/pasting the same, they do this in replies and in original posts. This is high noise and low information, and those contributors should be penalized rather than rewarded by the ranking system. 

To expand this further, my ideal design would be a two-tier Ranking system:

Tier 1 - Entry Level

Here, yes, there are ranks that depend on how many posts has a user has authored and for how long he has been member of the community. However, these are NOT Quality indicators; they are rather preliminary elimination factors from the Quality Tier in the ranking system. Such rankings should be used to identify new and low-participation members, while having several ranks within this tier would serve as an incentive to rise in the ranking through further participation. 

Tier 2 - The Quality League

This is the Ranking league where Quality authors get identified exclusively based on how good their participation has been in the Community. The how good measure will be a ratio-based weight, rather than a low-information absolute number. 

The biggest influence of my background will be evident here. I am essentially a telecom engineer and machine data analysis has been a big part of my career and interest. To design Quality-based ranking rules for this tier, I would certainly make use of the main principles of Information Theory; to identify the highest signal-to-noise ratios 🙂

So here how it goes. I'm defining several criteria for Rank calculation, each criterion will have its own weight, and a combination of these weights would indicate the Rank: 

1. What is the Accepted Solution-to-Post ratio? What weighted value this Author has been contributing to other Community Members?
   An author with 100 accepted solutions among his 500 posts (20% ratio) should have a higher weight in this criterion than an author with 2000 posts and 200 solutions (6% ratio).
   
   
2. What is the Like-to-Post ratio? That is how have other Community members perceived the usefulness and pertinence of your posts? 
   
   
3. What is the Ranking of members who like your posts? Likes by higher-ranking members have higher weights. 
   
   
4. How many community posts you have been reading, and how much time you've spent reading community posts? This is the only exception allowing how many and for how long to be a factor for the Quality tier ranking. Reading as opposed to authoring is an indication of dedication.
   Actually, this criterion can also be used as an elimination factor for members with low reading stats who should be given low rankings; there is a number of members who just ask, sometimes repeatedly, and they just do not read even when given the links. 
   
   
5. Tips and Tricks, Feature Requests and Bug Reports. I would give these their own weight that would be higher than other posts, and their Likes would also have higher weights. However, since currently there's no mechanism for validating such posts and members can freely post a Question or Please solve my problem in Tips and Tricks for example, I would keep this as a future enhancement till such validation mechanism is available. 
   
   
6. Information age, mirroring social networks algorithms. That is, all other things considered, most recent posts have slightly higher weight than older posts. 
   
   
7. Also, we shouldn't forget the role of the human Community Manager. In addition to the calculated weights above, Community managers should retain the ability to manually promote or demote members. 
   
   

3. Answering some questions

I think asking people to answer these questions in a survey, rather than in a public post, would get you better results. Anyway, here are my answers:

• What do you like or what do you think could be improved about our existing Community ranks and recognition program (i.e. ranks, badges, gamification)?
  I do like the current badges. As for the current ranking naming I find it vague and sometimes ambiguous. I'd suggest more representative names based on a two-tier system.
  
  

• What would help motivate you to participate in community activities that help uplevel your rank? 
  It is nice to have a high rank in a forum, but that will not be my motivation to participate more. I personally have a self-drive to share knowledge and help others, which that's not influenced by the ranking. I do however appreciate kind words from fellow members when I'm able to provide them some help.
  
  

• Would you be interested in participating in activities such as speaking at a community event, joining a Q&A panel, authoring a community blog, being featured in a member spotlight, etc.?
  Yes, with pleasure. 

I hope this would prove useful. Thanks for reading..

[Marc_Dillon]

Currently the ranks are displayed as simple black text under each poster's name. Utterly indistinguishable. I can't say I ever pay attention to those more than 1% of the time. I suggest perhaps adding colors to different ranks, or maybe a simple star system, 0 to 5 stars.

Badges? Yah... I'm not ever going to go to another person's profile to see their badges.

I think you can easily spend loads of time agonizing over an elaborate algorithm to assign ranks. So I wouldn't suggest doing that. Keep it simple, and have the top-most ranks only available to be manually assigned by certain top members or moderators (perhaps with a vote?)

To me, the purpose of the ranks is to:

1. Allow posters with questions to better determine whose answers to trust. (make the rank names / badges / stars clear enough to show their actual rank)
2. Provide a small bit of motivation for members to contribute. (make the names/badges/stars "fancy" enough so members are proud to have them)

To aid that, make sure the ranks/badges/stars/whatever are A: clear enough to show their rank to new people, and B: "fancy" enough that members would be proud to have and display them.

Likes are probably more important than number of posts/replies.

Perhaps something like this?

stars	rank	achievement required
no stars	"new member"/"visitor"	NA
⭐	"participant"	10 posts/replies
⭐⭐	"regular"	50 posts/replies with at least 25 likes.
⭐⭐⭐	"knowledgeable"	100 likes
🧠	"expert"	awarded by moderators and/or other experts
🛡️	"moderator"
appsheet logo	"appsheet staff"

Something like that, I dunno...

EDIT: Jesus, this forum blows, I'm not even going to try to make the above look any better.

[Ratatosk]

What do you like or what do you think could be improved about our existing Community ranks and recognition program (i.e. ranks, badges, gamification)?

I mostly agree with the rest of the posts here, but I disagree with one major point: Utterly competence based ranking.

Participation needs to be encouraged. If you are too scared to try to answer a question, because how it will affect your standing on the forum, it's not encouraging development of new talents that might contribute more later. 

Framing a question, and framing an answer it is often equally hard. Knowing roughly what skill level the asker is currently on will sometimes change what the solution to the problem is, and even who gives an applicable solution.

Show with a badge who actually contributes on the forum. Personally I would like to prioritize helping new members and people who take some share in participating in other members posts. Nobody likes a leecher. It is after all a community.

What would help motivate you to participate in community activities that help uplevel your rank?

The tool you choose is half the job as they say.

Corporate unification discarded one of the best forums on the planet. The open source platform Discourse.

A huge loss to the community that we are still grappling with.

If you were to come up with your own rank names for the Google Cloud Community, what would they be?

Don't really care as long as they are identifiable.

Are there other rank/badge programs you’ve seen or been a part of? What are they and what do you like or dislike about them?

I have nothing to contribute here.

Would you be interested in participating in activities such as speaking at a community event, joining a Q&A panel, authoring a community blog, being featured in a member spotlight, etc.?

I don't think I have time at work to do those things very often. Maybe in quieter seasons.

[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

My suggestions on ranking are much similar to @Marc_Dillon 

Have captured all suggestions in a 5 slides presentation as I could not add images for community's quick review. Adding of png images is giving error. 

Request you all to browse the link.

Edit: Yesterday, I was unable to upload images in teh community due to a portal bug. . Today, I can upload images. So sharing the feedback in images form. 

[Kirk_Masden]

Thank you, @Suvrutt_Gurjar !  Your post is filled with great ideas but I'd like to focus on the parts that relate to tips and tricks, which I'm glad to see that you also value.  
When the new community got started, I felt that contributions to "Tips and tricks" were quite undervalued whereas "Solutions" were very highly valued.  Here's a post I made in that regard:

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Community-Feedback/Better-recognition-for-quot-Tips-quot-con...

I'm happy to report that this has been fixed and that it is now possible to view rankings for contributions to "Tips and tricks":

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/kudos/leaderboardpage/board-id/appsheet-tips-tricks/timerang...

I'd like to point out that AppSheet documentation, though often quite good, has many "holes" (unaddressed issues, etc.) that get covered in "Tips and tricks."  "Q&A" is a very important indirect supplement to documentation but I think that "Tips and tricks" supplements the documentation in a more direct way.  In fact, if AppSheet staff were to  incorporate "Tips and tricks" content into official AppSheet documentation, with recognition to the original posters of related Tips, I know that I for one would be very pleased to see my work recognized (if I were to be lucky enough to be honored in that way 😉 ).  

In regard to ranking according to the number of "solutions" one has found, obviously, a high number of solutions is a clear indication of very important contributions to the community.  My impression has been, however, that other kinds of contributions -- tips, ideas, public identification of bugs (which is important in that it lets others know about and issue, unlike messages to Support), helpful comments that aren't "solutions," etc. -- have been rather undervalued.
I'm looking forward to seeing how AppSheet tweaks the recognition system in the future. 🙂
P.S. In regard to the public identification of bugs, that's not even a category here.  I really think it should be. "Feature ideas" is slightly similar in that it has to do with the improvement of the platform, but the title "Feature ideas" makes identification of bugs and other issues that require attention or areas where the improvement of preexisting features is needed seem rather unwelcome.  So, either expanding the Feature ideas category or adding another one, would be good, I think.

[Lauren_vdv]

Really appreciate the detail provided @Suvrutt_Gurjar!!!

[takuya_miyai]

Hi @Lauren_vdv 

Are there other rank/badge programs you’ve seen or been a part of? What are they and what do you like or dislike about them?

The AppSheet Community ranking before the transition was easy to understand.

It was easy to see a list of each member's contributions to the community and their activities.
As a community member, I could naturally learn about each member's background, attitude toward AppSheet, and knowledge.

The current community has a page for the same purpose, but from my point of view, it is hidden deep inside and the listing is not desirable.

 https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/kudos/kudosleaderboardpage/board-id/appsheet-questions/timer...

Also, as for the current ranking, it seems to be a title derived by Google algorithm, similar to @graham_howe opinion, and does not have much meaning for me.

I don't hold the previous community function sacred, but I feel that simply quantifying the number of activities of each member would naturally achieve the goal of this thread.

[Steve]

I'm entirely indifferent to user ranks and badges: they don't affect my participation. Given that they don't affect my participation, I'd rather they go away so as to reduce on-screen clutter and so their implementation does not distract the implementation team for other, more-useful features.

[Kirk_Masden]

Here's another thought regarding a type of contribution that might be valued a bit more: adopted proposals.  I just posted a feature idea.  I don't know if it will lead to an actual change in the platform but if support for the idea from other users and/or "gee, you know, that would be better" responses from AppSheet decision makers were to lead to the actual adoption of the idea, I think that would warrant some sort of recognition akin to a "solution" in Q&A.  There may be a sense in which such recognition is even more important than so-called "solutions" because it comes from the top and leads to more-or-less permanent changes in the platform. The same might be said for those who first identify bugs that AppSheet recognizes as requiring fixes.

[Kirk_Masden]

In regard to getting credit for feature ideas that get picked up and used, I'd like to site this post:

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/Rich-TextType/idi-p/271935

I'm not familiar with the poster; his "rank" doesn't seem to be particularly high.  But he sure hit the ball out of the park by suggesting the introduction rich text into "long text" columns.  I'd be happy to see someone who makes one or two truly "spot on" recommendations get "promoted" more quickly, even if their number of posts and/or "solutions" is low.  🙂