We need points, ranks, and rewards to encourage activity

[Kyle]

I've been waiting for points, ranks, and rewards to be integrated as a core Ning feature since you acquired Scripts4Ning... I'd love to have 4-5 different levels for members to aspire to based on activity in all areas, expertise on particular network topics, and seniority. The level badges would be customizable by network and would be displayed similar to your current Ning badges on profile photos. This solution would be great for all networks including Creators. Having ranks and the reward (badge) will drive people who are passionate about a network to want to contribute to attain this advanced status. This would be very useful as a general feature on all of our networks to encourage activity.

[Guy Nicolay]

How's all of this going?  We now have a requirement for this too.

[Andy Dawson]

I'm surprised that the original post for this enhancement was over 3 years ago and still no automated solution! Completely agree with Kyle and others.

Having a system whereby members get recognised for their contributions is, I believe, a key factor in achieving high levels of member engagement. I've seen this work incredibly well on other membership sites: more contribution = more points = higher level of recognition within the community as a contributor. People like to be recognised for their efforts.

"Featuring" is good and the new categories and badges are a great start but it needs an automated solution to be scalable. For example the NC sets criteria for automatically awarding points for different levels of contribution say, X points for a blog post, Y, points for a photo, Z points for a forum answer, getting featured would boost your points etc. Clearly it would be good to have quality control to avoid over-enthusiastic posting (!), maybe a pre-qualifier for content to be considered as eligible would be a certain number of "likes". 

That's my ideal solution but, for now, a quick fix would be to include as much member info as possible in the export member data csv file particularly number of blog/photo/video/groups/albums etc they've created. With that I could approximate the above process manually outside of Ning - that shouldn't be difficult as the data is in the system.

I'd love to get a response from a Ning rep on this...

[Frank Garcia]

The information in the CSV file would be great. There is information that would be so useful to us; even at the point where the member fills out the profile questions etc. I agree with this request and interim solution that was suggested by Andy would be appreciated.

[Dan Moon]

A points system is most definately needed and i am sure would be appreciated by all.