Yes. I know that the community in here are against ranks, in general.
But. I got an idea. What if the individual user's ranks were determined by their postcount, as well as their "age"? (And by "age" i mean how long the user's have been registered. In days.)
Postcount/Days since registration.
This will give the user's a post/age-rating. (ie: 250/365 = 0.68) The post/age-rating will then be assigned to a specific rank.
It shouldn't be to hard to mod, the only problem is that I have no idea how to do this.
the rating u calculated is equivalent to number of posts per day. only thing this does is create competition among members, ending up with lot of nonsense spam. believe me i have seen this happen lot of times. as if there is something special about them. Here on vanilla we are all equal. thats what i like.
but that doesn't mean u can't do ranks or someone cannot make an extension of it. good luck
I think it is a nice function but depends on how you play with that. As admin, you may encourage users to have more posts but meaningful will be best. If the rank algorithm consider the "meaningful" as one more weighted factor in the algorithm, it will encourage the users to have better performances in the forums.
e.g. User Rating Value = # of posts * 10 + # of logins * 2 + # of clicks on your posts + # of replies to your posts *2 + # of favor posts (moderator marked one) * 50 It will be even nicer that, all those weighting factors are could be customized. Then this value will be associated with customized rank theme.
How to use the rating value? User could set up their posts' bar, like only beyond certain Rating Value (or rank)'s users could view their posts.
I think that's the main problem, the user ratings are really the only useful part of such a system. Giving out points for just posting (or post length) just encourages spamming, as already has been pointed out. You really have to get all users (or a subset of your users, like moderators) to rate things.
I've been thinking about installing the "Thankful People" extension on here. It's a pretty cool one where you can just thank people if they posted something that helped you out. That's about as close as I'd get to something like this...
Some of my users were posting crap since a while, so I installed Thankful People, but I changed it a bit... It's now called "Uninteresting Comments", and the link in the upper right corner displays "uninteresting".
And well, looks like self-moderation works. Nobody wants an uninteresting comment reported in his Intellectual Vacuity History :)