How to gain ranks on WoW-Pro - The Karma System

Dear wow-pro users. You've probably noticed that you can gain ranks with your member account on wow-pro.com. At the moment, the ranks are:
  1. Member
  2. Trusted Member
  3. Honored Member
  4. Revered Member
  5. Exalted Member
  6. Moderator
  7. Administrator
With each rank you get, you get an extra star added under your avatar:

  • Trusted Member:
  • Honored Member:
  • Revered Member:

And so on so forth, all the way to administrator.
But more importantly, with each rank come new priviledges:

1. Member Priviledges
  • receive karma points
  • create/edit content
  • create/edit forum topics
  • edit wiki pages
  • view revisions
  • send/view private messages
  • access user profiles
2. Trusted Member Priviledges
  • skip captcha challenges (you know, those annoying codes you have to enter to validate every post you make)
  • post comments without approval (no more moderation queue for you!)
  • cancel own vote on polls
3. Honored Member Priviledges
  • revert revisions
  • rename the url of your articles
  • create polls
4. Revered Member Priviledges
  • create new encyclopedia books
  • administer smileys
5. Exalted Member Priviledges
  • post news on the frontpage!
  • outline guides into the encyclopedias (change their category)
  • inspect votes on polls
6. Moderator Priviledges
  • administer comments and their approval queue
  • administer forums
  • edit guides (of anyone)
  • edit news posts
That's all for now, but there will be much more priviledges in the future. The more wow-pro grows, the more advantages you'll get from being a high ranked member of our community.

How do I gain ranks?

To gain ranks, you must reach a certain amount of Karma Points.

5 Karma Points = Trusted Member Status
20 Karma Points = Honored Member Status
50 Karma Points = Revered Member Status
100 Karma Points = Exalted Member Status
200 Karma Points = Moderator Status

How do I gain Karma?

You can gain Karma by posting on wow-pro.com or on my blog.

Useful post = +1 Karma
Very useful post = +2 Karma
Ok Guide = +2 Karma
Good Guide = +4 Karma
Very good Guide = +6 Karma
Awesome Guide = +8 Karma

You can also lose Karma. This is a necessary evil to prevent people to spam the site with useless / bad information. Quality comes first.

Bad post = -1 Karma
Very bad post = -2 Karma
Bad guide = -1 Karma

Who attributes those points and how?

I keep an excel sheet updated everyday with every new post, guide or guide updates. I am 100% unbiased and I try to be as fair as possible. In the future, this will all be automated and everyone will be allowed to rate guides / comments. The site will be majorly revamped with a lot of new cool features, including a in-built ranking system. But for now, I'm the one managing it manually. Moderators will also be able to give points in the future as well.

Tips to gain Karma

  • Make an effort with your spelling. Nobody likes to read broken english, with no punctuation, no caps.
  • Avoid "d00d" speech. "u", "ur", "ure", "thx" is just irritating to many readers. Just spell the words, it's not that hard to spell 1 or 2 extra letters. You, you're, your, thanks.
  • Before you write a guide, please read Jame's Guide Writing Guide. It should cover the basics.
  • Don't waste other people's time. Before you ask a question, look if that question has already been answered. You don't know how many times I've had to answer the same question. Like "hey jame are you gonna write guides for WotLK? If yes, can you give an ETA?". This is very frustrating, that question is answered on our very front page. So please, before you ask a question, check the front page, check the website's section concerning your question, and if you still haven't found an answer, then write your comment. It will save me a lot of time, and the more time I have, the more guide I can write for you guys.
  • Try to use the same name when you post on my blog as your user name on wow-pro, so that I can attribute +karma points to your account if you make a useful comment here on the blog. You can also simply leave a signature at the end of your blog posts mentioning your user name on wow-pro.
If you follow the above guidelines, you will never get Karma points deducted, you can only gain Karma.

It's quite simple really. Post useful things, be helpful to other members, post intelligent comments, informative content, and your Karma will go up the roof.

I've recently had a couple of members achieve honored status within a single week. One of them didn't even create a single guide, all he did was post very useful comments, which helped other users or which saved me a lot of time and helped me fix errors in my guides quickly. The other one just wrote a bunch of guides, they were mediocre at the start, and after he followed my advice, he turned those mediocre guides into Awesome guides.

The wow-pro community is growing every day and it is here to stay. Be an active part of it and you'll reap the benefits down the road, or god forbid, you might just want to help other people for free and be part of a nice community. :)

19th January Update: The Karma system is now automated and fully integrated in the site. You can check how many points you have in your user profile. To access your user profile, you can either click on your own avatar in a comment/guide you made, or simply click on "My Account" on the right-side menu.

And the best part, the rankings are now updated instantly whenever you gain points. Follow this link to see the Karma Rankings.

17 Response to "How to gain ranks on WoW-Pro - The Karma System"

  1. Unknown says:

    I love the Concept, and think it is a strong way of doing things…I would like to really recommend you avoid the concept of “automated” system.

    Given enough time, say 2 years, many people will have enough Karma for a lot of things, I do not think you want 20+ people with editing privileges everywhere on a site with say 1000~10000 commenter’s.

    After years being a mod for various groups in different guises…I truly recommend the beneficent Dictator point of view.

    What am I saying…people should have gained privileges…but once you get to the “editing of others material” that should be appointed for the most part.

    Unless you are going for WIKI stripes, and at that point it requires both edits and comments on edits and …well a slightly different environment then I think is currently on your site, but I could be wrong.

    Jame says:

    You're very right. The last step will always remain a manual decision, just to be on the safe side, one cannot become a moderator through an automated way, it could lead to many problems.

    Up to exalted, automated is fine, but the last promotion will always be done manually.

    Bill says:

    Great now I need to grind rep outside of wow!

    I can't wait until he makes this blog into a 25 man instance. Then you will just have to kill a boss and hope your class guide drops!

    :P

    Sorry I could not resist .. guess I get negative karma now.. but it was worth it!

    Jame says:

    Hehe no way, jokes never hurt anyone, your Karma is safe!

    myWoWHead says:

    Hey Jame, Love your WoW Pro Site and am new to world of Warcraft. My son talked me into playing and it all just seems so foreign. He showed my you guide site and a couple of PAID sites he got guides from. I thought it would be fun to go thru them as I level up a few characters and see how they help. *Smiles* Thanks again for all your work and I will be signing up and positing on your other site... myWoWHead

    Jame says:

    Welcome and thanks for your comment. Tell your son to stop paying for guides, since mine are free and actually better than the paid ones ;)

    Pharoahty says:

    Instead of exalted being automated couldn't it be up to revered? Because at revered you can do the things a good, trusted member should be able to do at a site.

    But at exalted it's almost like a mini-moderator .And not to be selfish but I'm working hard on a guide right now, I know it small but it's still effort put. And I really wouldn't want anyone that isn't manually given editing privileges by you to be able to edit my guide or posts in any way.

    So what I suggest is move editing privileges to moderator or move automated to revered. Just something I would like to see/not see. Just my thoughts.
    -Pharoahty

    Jame says:

    You're right about that Pharoahty.

    I've made the following changes:

    -editing guides and news post moved to Moderator status.

    -exalted members can now create news posts for the front page (warning though, if the news post is useless or bad, you'll lose karma and can potentially lose your right to make news posts)

    -Exalted and Moderator ranks are now harder to attain (100 Karma instead of 80 Karma for Exalted and 200 Karma instead of 150 Karma for Moderator

    Mike says:

    Noticed a [b]very[/b] little typo.

    ''100Karma Points = Exalted Member Status''

    There's no space between 100 and Karma ;)

    -Mike

    I've been trying to access www.wow-pro.com for a while now and I keep getting an "address not found" error - are you guys doing something to the site right now?

    Anonymous says:

    You never cease to amaze me Jame.

    I was about *this* close to paying for a Gold Mastery Guide... Umm.. I won't say the name. I decided against it because I can find anything I could ever want on WoW-Pro.

    Starting out my own guide soon enough. Something extremely simple, just to see how I do.

    Blood Elf starter area. I've played through the area so many darn times, I think I've found an extremely efficient way to get through it.

    But that's another topic.

    Thanks again Jame!

    Mike says:

    At Rightwinger:

    No, they aren't working on the site at the moment.

    Try this link: http://www.wow-pro.com
    If it isn't working, there may be a ban on your IP adress, but I think that's not it.

    Another thing that could be going is, is that your provider is blocking the site. If you really can't get it to work, I would recommend to make a call to your provider and ask what could be wrong ;)

    -Mike

    Cloud9 says:

    Seems very revarding, maybe i should write up some guides now ;) But i have one question, if I write a guide in a foreign language, how do you know its not a lot of bullcrap? Or does guides in foreign languages not recieve karma?

    Jame says:

    If a guide in another language is a load of crap, it will quickly be reported to me by someone who can speak the language :)

    I can read French and German fluently, and Snowflake can also read croatian. So those are already covered :P

    For other languages, I'm counting on our trusted members.

    Pharoahty says:

    Oh that's awesome! I wish I could read other languages =( but alas I'm a "foreign language noob".

    I'm so screwed, I have way to much time on my hands, and way, way, to much to say. However my grammar is equal to that of a 3 year old.

    Jame says:

    @juggalolove What you just posted was just fine, grammar and spelling wise :)