Last revised: October 22, 2015
Communities has a Member Points System (MPS) that controls how member points are earned, which contributes to overall site ranking and rank badges. We currently display this information on each member's About Me page. An explanation of what posts and points are follows.
The Member Points System (MPS) is a simple rating system that gives members configurable badges for community participation (e.g. ratings, posts, replies, downloads, friends, wiki comments and edits, new pages, etc.) as well as some quality factors (verified answers, ratings, and bookmarked post). It should be noted that
Both posts and members receive points for various activities. These include:
Quality Factors:
Participation:
The formula for calculating points for a post in the Post Factor is to multiply each factor value set by Bentley by the number of times an activity occurs. For the purpose of the MPS, a post is defined as a forum post, a blog entry, an uploaded file, a gallery image, or any reply/comment to one of these. Points for new wiki pages are calculated by another factor. It should be noted that points are primarily a quantity and do not indicate quality. In other words, a member could have a relatively large number of points, but not contribute much (if anything) quality-wise.
By default, the Communities displays member rank whenever a user allows the cursor to hover over a user name.
Communities ranks currently are:
The author of a post also receives points. When determining the number of points for a particular member, the author is credited with the total for each post authored in addition to any points received for rating content and being marked as a favorite.
Posts that are awaiting moderation, conversations, and posts in forums marked as disabling points are not included in point calculation. Furthermore, any activities that act on an individual's own posts are not credited with points. For example, a post will not receive points for a reply if the author replies to themselves, rates their own post, downloads a file they uploaded, or marks their own post as a favorite.
Here is some additional information about how points are calculated:
Something called decay is also a factor taken into account, which can reduce points over time. Older and more established content can have lowered scores, which in turn lowers its placement in search results, lowers the content quality score of the community and application where it is located, and can lower the author "quality score" that the author has attained.
Points are configurable and will likely change as Communities continues to evolve. Although the factors involved might be subjective to some, the points and posts do provide some insight as to how each Communities member's overall contributions compare to others on the site.