• How do member ranks work, and why should I care?
• How are authors ranked, exactly?
• My rank is displayed inaccurately somewhere on the site, what's up?

Purpose of Ranks

1. To give you recognition for your contributions to ITNewb; and to
2. make it easy for others to identify how much of an active participant you are in the community.

Increasing Your Rank

• When you perform certain activities on the site like comment on an article or grade an article, you receive points. There are 7 ranks, and as you earn more and more points you climb the ladder of these 7 ranks.

Badges and Titles

• Each of the 7 ranks has an accompanying badge and title.

• The more articles you push into the archive, the higher your author rank will be. Your rank is based on the sum of the overall grades of each of your archived articles.

  Let's say we only had 2 authors, and each author published 2 articles that were archived. The first author received the following grades: 87% B+ and 94% A- (181 points); and the second author received a 91% A- and 98% A+ (189 points). The second author in our example would be ranked 1st on the Authors List, and the other author would be 2nd.

  For an article to be archived, it must receive at least an 85% B+. So, author ranks are primarily built around the number of archived articles they have.

  You're guaranteed 85 points for every article you write that gets archived, but the other 15 points (to make up a perfect grade of 100% A+) does make things a little more intersting.

• ITNewb uses memcached heavily to cache content in memory so we don't have to pull it from the database on every request. This helps us scale the site and support more traffic.

  The vast majoriy of these cached objects are immediately purged or updated to reflect changes in the database, but some of them are not.

  The objects that could cause an inaccurate rank title or author rank to be displayed are cached for about 1 hour. So, it's possible for a few areas on the site (comments, shouts, author list) to display stale information for up to 1 hour until it expires.