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Today, a new experience points system has been implemented. We've been crafting it for several months behind the scenes, with help from your team of moderators & admins.

So, what is vBExperience??

vBExperience is an advanced Level and Activity System (with Shop - currently not enabled, but it's our goal to set this up too), Awards & Achievements. It calculates an activity and experience score for every user based on their activities on the forum. Members will see how their level is increasing by participating within the community.

Communities are not only defined by post count, there are many more parameters that matter: Are the postings the user creates helpful? Are the threads frequently read? Does the user participate within the community by posting pictures, attachments, leaving visitor messages, tagging threads?

I'm sure you get the idea...

Before the doubters shout 'this is going to promote spam'... No, it shouldn't! The system only looks at posts made within certain forums... so if we find posting spam all day in the off-topic forum we will simply remove that forum from being included in the calculations :)

The system is setup to promote use of some aspects of the community, which get ignored, or which are not utilized to their full potential. In that sense, the introduction of this system 'may' improve your experiences within the myg37 community. You are also free to ignore it, and carry on as usual.

The way it looks... that can be changed. So bear with us as we're launching this for the very first time on any site!

Hot links can be seen in the top navigation bar and also within the quick links drop down... info in displayed within user profile pages and also via advanced stats and league tables.

Have a look around the system before judging... it's pretty fun once you check out everything that's covered. Also, if you have ideas for other awards of achievements, by all means, let's hear them!

The key difference between Awards & Achievements are: Achievements are like mileposts, which anyone can get, and then hold on to, provided they still meet the requirements. Whereas Awards can only be held by one person at a time.

'Some' of the things this system is scoring are as follows... (points per item purposely not discussed!)

Included into calculations are these things:

Threads

- Created threads
- Thread views of own threads
- Thread replies of own threads
- Thread votes of own threads
- Thread tags
- Replies to own threads
- Sticky threads

Posts

- Created posts
- Views on attachments
- Deleted posts
- Edited Posts
- Final post in a thread

User

- Days since registration
- Referrals
- Received infractions (points deducted!)
- Reputation / Use of reputation system
- Visitor messages on profiles
- Members of own social groups
- Albumpictures
- Friends

Misc

- Infractions given & received
- Raising a thread from the dead
- Creating Calendar Events
- More to come...

Calculation of user activity
The system calculates the activity by taking the average post count of the ten most active users and comparing it to the individual users post count. This can be set to count only the last X days, e.g. last 28 days.


Colored Bars Explained...

Three bars displaying user experience can be seen in the postbit beside each members' posts.

The red bar indicates current experience points and graphically represents user level on a range of level 1 to level 100.

The blue bar represents your current percentage of the number of points required to progress up to the next level. ie, if you are promoted to the next level up, your blue bar will start close to zero and slowly increase as your experience points increase.

The green bar indicates your activity within the community, bench marked against the average activity of the top ten most active members. (see above)


In a nutshell,

This system attempts to promote constructive use of the community. (so that we all benefit)

If you reply to peoples threads, make use of social networking tools, use the attachment system, use friends area, submit thread tags, etc, etc (things that enrich the community) your experience score will be higher.

I hope that you guys find this to be fun, and engaging, we've spent lots of time trying to 'get it right'.

As I mentioned above, if you have ideas for new awards etc, please, let us hear them, and we'll do our best to incorporate them. This is the first time we've done something like this, so lets have some fun with it :)

-The CobaltSS.Net staff

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