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?

'Some' of the things this system is scoring are as follows...

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.


Coloured 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.