Display both rank and role with user names

[#1]

Displaying both a rank and role with each user name would allow both the type of user and the status of the user to be displayed. For example, we have assigned the rank of "Certified Consultant" along with a special icon to our partners to identify them as "experts." But this prevents a rank based on participation from displaying, which is important because these are our top contributors.

[#2]

You are right Mike, members often have more than one value they bring to the community today. I definitely like the idea of rewarding members in multiple ways.

Not sure about exposing roles, though. Roles are used for a number of reasons, not the least is permissions. There are some things about users you don't necessarily want everyone to know. But expertise, participation, program membership, all would have an impact on how I judge the quality of content, and it would be nice to recognize each. Perhaps multiple types of ranks that could display for users would work better? Then you could set up different kinds of criteria to be used to achieve mulitple ranks.

A few questions that come to mind:

• Are there additional types of ranks beyond the previous ones you mentioned that you can imagine awarding to your members?
• How many ranks would you display at once, or would it differ by what section was being viewed?
• If so, how would you choose which ones to display in different places?

[#3]

At this point, we need to display only two ranks, which would not vary by section being viewed. The first would be an unchanging "member type." For example, we have Employees, Certified Consultants, Development Partners, and Network Members. And we may add more in the future.

Then, within each of those groups there are varying levels of contributors that we want to recognize. This would be the existing "ranking," as it works today.

Thanks for considering this.

[#4]

Interesting...

I could see this being a benefit for larger communities that have complex ranks & roles to keep up with. 

I'm not sure I would want to display roles in public, but maybe having them displayed, like IP addresses are, when one is logged in as a Mod or Admin could be an interesting feature.

Cool suggestion!

[#5]

We also use roles mostly for permissions.  Specifically, we use them to grant access to private and beta boards.  To distinguish between an employee and a customer we use different ranks.  The employee ranks show up with blue names and the customer ranks show up with gold names.  There are a few other groups that we would be interested in recognizing in addition to their forum rank, so if there was a way to give someone two ranks to display that may help.

[#6]

In our internal employee-only community, we had a need to display users' job titles, but didn't want to totally give up the rank space as a way to reward participation.

Our workaround was basically to use the rank name to display role (job title in our case) but then to create additional ranks within each job title that displayed a special icon based on participation.  This has worked well, though managing all the different levels of ranks can be complicated. 

Having two separate rank spaces would be a good solution to make the system a little more flexible (vs. trying to use the rank space to acheive two different things).

[#7]

Displaying the ranks publicly makes sense but not roles. Having a listing of all user roles (only visible to moderators and admins) on a user's profile page might be a good idea.

Alissa, in your internal employee only community where a user has multiple ranks, (mostly a rank to denote employee status and one based on participation) where does the secondary rank (that shows up as an icon) show up?

Message Edited by manjeerap on 02-15-2009 10:19 PM