It is also worth remembering that what works for one community may not work for another – the beauty of online communities is that each and every one is different.

I love your forum ranks – they are really original and are encouraging additional forum interaction (the ultimate goal of any forum developer).

I would also recommend you throw out some custom rank titles every now and again (as discussed in this article) to make your forum really unique.

Mine doesn’t have a niche (it’s general discussion), so I thought of some odd and fanciful terms that probably make no sense, while some are also odd an fanciful, while having decent relevance to the members, nonetheless. And I made good use of the thesaurus in this venture. For instance, the very first rank assigned to a member is “SD Pathogen”. What’s it mean? Who knows. Someone inquired, another member responded guessing “SD” means “sexual disease”, heh.

Somewhere higher up on the rank chain lies “Resident Lightbearer”. OK, so he posts a lot, and has been active, for to get that rank you have about at least 500 posts. So the terms make sense, resident referring to his membership to the forum, and lightbearer being a reference to his activity, as if he holds the torch for the continuance of the forum’s activity. Highest rank so far is “Fossilized Denizen”. That one probably makes the most sense of all.

Oh, and if you reach the rank of at least “Resident Lightbearer”, you can choose a custom rank in your profile. That’s possible thanks to the user groups permissions in vBulletin.

I’ve listed all my ranks and the posts required to received them in “FAQ/NSFAQ”, a sticky topic I placed in my required reading forum (first forum on the forum index, titled “Requisite Reading”) that is my customized FAQ topic for my forum. I added a message to the top of the vBulletin FAQ page linked on the main menu, with a link to that custom FAQ.