A Rank grants or removes specific community privileges (called Abilities). Ranks can be manually assigned to a user or earned by fulfilling the Rank's associated Criteria (e.g., accruing a set amount of points, contributing a set amount of posts, etc.).
📝 NOTE: A Rank is not the same as a Role and its associated permissions, which govern content access, moderation abilities, and administrator access. See Roles & Permissions to learn more.
✔️ TIP: Rank Check is a feature that automatically performs a check when a new Rank is added and/or an existing one is edited. Vanilla performs a Rank Check (of all users) to ensure that they have the proper Rank, and makes adjustments if necessary. This triggers notifications to any users who have enabled Notification Preferences > Notify me when my rank changes.
Ranks overview
- Ranks provide a number of community benefits. They can: limit malicious practices by limiting user abilities; publicly identify certain types of users (e.g., MVPs); reward users for participation; and allow veteran users a greater deal of control in your community through enhanced privileges.
- A user can have only one Rank at any time. Typically, the user's Rank is displayed on their discussions and comments, after their name. User's Titles display after their Rank.
- Users only receive the highest-level Rank they qualify for. For example, if someone qualifies for Level 5, they will NOT also receive the privileges associated to Levels 1–4.
- There are seven default Ranks: Level 1 through Level 5, Moderator, and Administrator. The order of the list matters. In this case, Administrator is the highest Rank because it has the highest Level number and is therefore last in the list. Conversely, Level 1 is the lowest Rank.
Enable the Ranks addon
Ranks is an optional addon administrators can enable for their Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community. To do so:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Addons > Addons.
- Click the Ranks toggle to turn it ON.
Add & edit Ranks
✔️ TIP: The steps in this section will trigger: the Rank Check (described earlier in this article) to ensure that all users have the proper Rank, and the notifications to users who have enabled Rank-change updates.
Generally speaking, you don't want to have too many Ranks. We recommend starting with five, but the appropriate number really depends on the size and needs of your community.
✔️ TIP: A best practice is to have special ranks for your Administrators and Moderators so that your users can easily tell the difference between organizational staff and other users.
To manage your Ranks:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Membership > Ranks.
3. Click Add Rank to create one or a pencil icon to edit one.
- The options used to configure a Rank are described below.
Rank details
These are the details that you have to configure for each Rank.
- Name: The name of the Rank, which is what users will see in the notification they receive when they achieve the Rank.
- Label: The label is what will appear next to users' names in discussions and comments after they receive the rank. Emojis and HTML can be added as well.
- Level: Level is a number that determines the precedence of assigning automatic Ranks.
- For Ranks set to be automatically granted, users will receive the Rank with the highest level that they have met the criteria for. For example, if someone qualifies for Level 5, they will NOT also receive the privileges associated to Levels 1–4.
- If you create a manually assigned Rank and do not want any automated Ranks to overrule it, make sure it has a higher level than all your automated Ranks.
- CssClass: This option is for theme developers. They can assign a valid CSS class to a Rank and it will be applied to the wrapper around their discussion or comment. This is useful for making certain ranked users’ content appear more prominently. For example, if you had an “Expert” Rank, maybe you’d highlight their comments with a special background colour.
- Body & Message: These only appear immediately after a user attains a Rank. The Body is emailed to the user (use plain text only); the Message appears at the top of the page when the Rank is triggered.
Rank Criteria
A Rank's criteria defines how it can be earned. Use these criterion to drive the behaviors you want to see in your Vanilla community.
⭐️ EXAMPLE: To help increase engagement, you could limit Ranks being earned to only those who reach a certain points threshold or who contribute a specific number of posts.
This is also where you control whether a Rank is automatically or manually assigned.
You can set thresholds via the following criteria:
- Points: A user must have accrued the specified number of points.
- Time: A user must have been a member of your community for the defined duration (e.g., 1 day, 3 weeks, 1 month).
- Posts: A user must contribute the specified number of posts (of any discussion type + comments)
- Roles: Only users belonging to the selected Role can earn the Rank.
- Permission: There are two options: Moderator and Administrator. Assign the Rank to all users belonging to a Role that has the
Garden > Moderation > Manage permission (Moderator) or the Garden > Settings > Manage permission (Administrator).
🛑 IMPORTANT: You can mix and match these criterion to be as open or strict as you need. Just remember that ALL thresholds you set must be met for the Rank to be earned.
⭐️ EXAMPLE: If you set Points to 50 and Posts to 10, a user must have 50 points and 10 posts to earn the Rank. This system gives you the flexibility to be as open or as strict as you want when it comes to your users earning Ranks.
Manually give a Rank
By default, Ranks are assigned automatically when users meet their associated criteria. However, you can toggle the Enable Applying Manually option in the Criteria section to make it so the Rank can only be given manually (typically by an admin).
📝 NOTE: A Rank that is set to be manually applied will no longer be applied automatically.
With the above option enabled, let's walk through how to actually give someone the Rank.
📝 NOTE: You must belong to a Role with the Garden > Users > Edit permission to manually give a Rank.
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Moderation > Users.
- Click the pencil icon to edit a user.
- Click the Ranks dropdown and select the Rank to give them. Only Ranks you've set to manual will appear in this dropdown.
- Click Save.
Rank Abilities
This is where you define what privileges the Rank does or does not provide. Generally speaking, certain abilities are typically removed from lower Ranks while more abilities are given to higher Ranks.
You can give each ability the value of give, take away, or default.
- The default value represents what the user would be allowed to do if the Ranks addon was disabled.
- The give and take away options do just that: give or remove the associated ability.
📝 NOTE: Some abilities are affected by other addons. It’s important to understand your current Vanilla community configuration before changing the default values for abilities.
For instance, in a default Vanilla configuration, users will not have a “Title” field. Therefore, Ranks’ “default” would be that no one has a Title. However, Profile Extender can be used to add a “Title” field, which would give Titles to all users. In that case, Ranks’ default would be that everyone has a title.
Applying Ranks via SSO
- When creating or editing a Rank, toggle the Enable Applying Manually option in the Criteria section to make it so the Rank can only be given manually (typically by an admin).
- Edit a user’s profile and select that Rank or apply it over SSO by adding a matching RankID parameter to the callback.
📝 NOTE: This only works for Ranks set to be manually assigned. Also, make sure that no automatically-triggered Ranks have a higher level, or they will override when triggered.
Using Ranks as incentives
You can use Ranks as an incentive for users to participate by rewarding them for their engagement.
What follows is an example of what abilities to grant for levels 1–5. It assumes the default Criteria of 50, 100, 500, and 1000 points for Level 2–5 respectively.
📝 NOTE: Gaining points on your site is done through addons such as Badges and Reactions. Users who gain the point levels of the default Ranks have demonstrated their ability to positively contribute to your community.
Suggested abilities
Levels 1 and 2 will retain their default abilities, or you can assign them abilities according the Handling spam or abuse section below.
For level 3, set the follow abilities.
- Title: Give
- Location: Give
- Me Actions: Deprecated, doesn't affect anything
Title and Location are fields that appear in every comment a user makes, allowing them to display more information about themselves.
For level 4, set the same as level 3, plus:
- Signatures: Give
- Discussion & Comment Editing: Authors may edit for 1 week
Signatures are snippets of text or images that a user may add to their profile which will show after every comment they make. You must have the Signatures addon enabled for this to work.
Discussion & Comment Editing is something that makes community use more enjoyable for users, but has a high potential for abuse. Therefore, only more trusted members should have longer editing time windows.
For level 5, set the same as levels 3 and 4, plus:
- Content Curation: Give
- Discussion & Comment Editing: Authors may edit for 1 month
Content Curation is a feature that interacts with the Reactions addon. The ability to Curate gives the special Reaction Promote (if it’s available on your community); this Reaction gives +5 points and puts the post on the Best Of page. This privilege also grants access to the Spam Reaction, which moves a post immediately to your Spam Queue for review by moderators.
Again, we set a longer Discussion & Comment Editing window for our most-trusted and experienced users.
Handling spam or abuse
Ranks can be used to limit the ability of spammers to take advantage of your community and protect users from abuse. To do this, limit the abilities of your newest users until they have a proven track record of trustworthiness.
Who is this for?
This section is for communities that are currently experiencing spam problems, and that have already tried other automated filtering solutions, like Akismet and Stop Forum Spam. Because this solution inhibits new user actions, which can have a detrimental effect, it should be used as a response to issues not as preemptive prevention.
Setting up Ranks to inhibit spam and abuse
What follows is a generalized recommendation for a large, high-traffic community. Please adjust the suggested values to match your community's specific needs.
Level 1
Edit your Level 1 Rank.
📝 NOTE: If you’ve previously edited your default Ranks already, instead set a Rank to have level 1 (or any level as long as it is the lowest level) with no Criteria (all fields should be blank.
Under Abilities, set the following values:
- Formatting Posts: Text
- Verified: Force Check
- Post Links: Take Away
- Titles: Take Away
- Locations: Take Away
- Signatures: Take Away
- Discussion & Comment Editing: Authors may never edit
Level 2
For your Level 2 Rank, set some low Criteria. A good recommendation would be a Post total of 5 or 10, depending on the activity level of your site.
For this Rank, set Abilities:
- Formatting Posts: text, links, and YouTube
- Titles: Take Away
- Locations: Take Away
- Signatures: Take Away
- Discussion & Comment Editing: Authors may never edit
Level 3 and above
For Level 3, set a higher Criteria like 50 posts or points. For this level (and any higher) you can leave default values or grant additional abilities with the “Give” option.
Setting up Ranks to prevent false-positives on spam
For your higher Ranks, set the Ability “Verified” to “bypass.” This will prevent your trusted members’ content from being evaluated by the spam filter, which means their content will never be put into the spam queue.
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
