The community here at AVC has been a testing ground for a new feature that Disqus will be rolling out throughout its network shortly. They call it Disqus Ranks. Anyone who has been in the AVC comments in the past two or three months has seen pieces of the Ranks service coming together.
Here is how it works:
1) the blogger and/or publisher uses a nice new tool provided by Disqus to score each community member. it looks like this (note that I will in all likelihood change these settings over time):
2) the blogger and/or publisher can turn on "ranks" in the comment threads. these ranks appear in the header of each comment. this is what we have been seeing here at AVC for the past few months.
3) the blogger and/or publisher can create custom ranks for the community using a range of conditions and metrics. these include absolute leaderboard position or any of the individual items being measure (shown above).
4) i did that yesterday. and i messed it up. i somehow made everyone "welcome back stranger" for most of the day yesterday. sorry about that. the folks at Disqus helped me fix it yesterday afternoon and now we have what I set up working. that is:
me – Bartender
top 10 – The Entourage
top 50 – The Gang
top 100 – The Regulars
top 250 – The Semi-Regulars
top 1000 – Familiar Face
top 2000 – Welcome Back Stranger
first comment – Newcomer
I'd like everyone's feedback on these names and the scores associated with them. I'd also like suggestions for other ranks. We can assign names to all kinds of behavior, first to comment, spam reporting, liking, replying, etc.
You can see that I've been working with a bar theme. I've always seen the AVC community as Cheers, a place people come hang out, have fun, talk about stuff, make and maintain friendships. So for now anyway, I'm going with that.
I think that's it. Let's disqus.
UPDATE: I've been playing around with Ranks as people are discussing them and giving me ideas. When I update the Ranks, they go away for a few minutes and the new ones come back. So you may not see them from time to time. Also, I added a new Rank called instigator for those community members who start conversations. Disqus makes me an instigator. I will try to get the bartender handle back but it is gone for now.
