XF 1.2 Organising automatic usergroup promotions - need a little help

[Stuart Wright]

Hi everyone.
So I want to create some usergroups with automatic promotions in order to encourage people to participate in the forums, enter user reviews of equipment in our editorial and such.

New Members. I'm inspired by Digital Point where new membership has some restrictions. No signatures, can't Like, can't enter competitions, can't user our classifieds etc. But after 48 hours membership and likes from 3 different people, they get automatic promotion to standard membership.
Standard Members is the equivalent of our current Members usergroup.
Established Members includes larger PC inbox, more PC recipients, PC attachments enabled, more links in sigs, can bookmark.
Veteran Members includes more PC allowances, more sig links, exclusive competitions.
Premium Membership is a paid option (thinking £5/month or £50/year) which gives more of the above plus PC auto responders, access to a private exclusive forum (with fewer rules) and no banner ads.

Other privileges and features will be distributed across the usergroup hierarchy as I feel is appropriate.
So my first question is what do you think of the idea?
And more importantly, how do I go about the task of working out the number of trophy points and other awards in order to create a fair and balanced progression up the ladder?
And how do I test it on the sandbox? By changing the promotion and doing some kind of cache rebuild? What do I do?

Thanks folks.

 

[Stuart Wright]

No advice at all on this? How can I calculate how many people will be promoted to each usergroup?

 

[Paul B]

Why do you need to calculate it?

Just set the user groups and promotions up how you want.

It's entirely personal preference.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Well I want to make it so that the various levels of membership take some effort to attain.
If I make it so that the number of trophy points is too easy to get and too many members make it to the top rank, then there will be no motivation for them to earn more trophy points.

So I want to set the number of trophy points up and see how many people are already at that level.

 

[Jeremy]

I think that all depends on how many trophies you have. If you have enough trophies that you have say, 3,000 total points, its going to be different than here where you have a max of ~1,000.

You should choose a healthy balanced based on how many trophies you actually offer.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Right, but I need to figure out how many members will be at what levels if I apply the various promotion criteria.

 

[Paul B]

You will need to get some data from the database for number of posts, likes (or equivalent), time registered, etc.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Hmmm. I think Xenforo needs a tool to calculate the effect of applying a promotion before we apply it.

 

[Jeremy]

Sort the user table (in phpMyAdmin) based on trophy points for a rough guess of how many would be in each tier (ie, if your first tier promotion needs a combined 85 points (manual calculation, you can see how many people would reach that tier as it stands). You can always adjust it later and anyone who is in that tier will be removed from it if you make the threshold higher.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Ok that's a plan, thanks. Will need to import the vb post thanks into post ratings thanks and work out a combination of posts and positive ratings (which include likes) to figure out how many users have how many trophy points in total and then split them into bands where only a small few are in the top band and the rest are evenly split up.
Here's a question. Is there a way to determine who has earned the most trophy points in a calendar month so that person can have a custom banner for the following month? Top trophy earning member?

 

[Alpha1]

Thats basically how I have vbulletin set up. Though I have many more promotions. It works nicely.

I think its important for you to define what exactly you want your members to do on your website. Then attribute various trophies to those goals and consider at which promotion levels you want these trophies to be attained. Then set the promotions up in such a way that to get promotion A, a user needs to hunt for trophy X,Y,Z.