Two systems, both in the gamification section of your community settings. The level system is off until you switch it on. Streaks are on by default, so your members are already building one.
Levels reward what a member contributes. Streaks reward that they keep coming back.
The level system
Members collect points and move up levels. You define the levels: each one has a name and the number of points it takes to reach it.
How points are earned
Here is the part that surprises people: points are awarded for what a member receives, not for what they write.
| Action | Default |
|---|---|
| Reaction on their post | 1 point |
| Comment on their post | 2 points |
| Reaction on their comment | 1 point |
| Reply to their comment | 1 point |
You can change all four, and reset them back to the defaults in one click.
This design is deliberate. Awarding points for posting rewards volume, and you get a community full of noise written by whoever types fastest. Awarding points for reactions and replies rewards posts other people found worth responding to.
Leave the defaults alone for the first months. Tuning point values before you know how your community behaves is guessing.
Designing levels
Make the first level easy. A member who gets to level 2 in their first week understands the system and wants the next one; a member who is still at level 1 after a month reads the whole thing as decoration.
Then space them out. Wide gaps at the top give your most active members somewhere to go for a long time.
Give levels names that fit your community, not "Level 4". The name is what members see and repeat.
Streaks
A streak counts consecutive days on which a member did something. It rewards habit rather than volume, which reaches a different kind of person entirely.
Four settings shape it.
- Qualifying actions: what counts as showing up.
- Minimum actions per day: how much of it is needed for the day to count.
- Freezes per month: how many missed days are forgiven.
- Milestone days: the lengths worth celebrating, such as 7, 30 and 100.
A separate switch emails members when their streak is at risk. That one is off until you turn it on.
Freezes matter more than they look
Without freezes, one missed day resets a member's 60-day streak to zero, and that member very often stops coming back entirely. It is the single most demotivating thing a streak system can do.
One or two freezes a month keeps the streak meaningful and survives a holiday, a deadline or a bad week.
Milestones and badges
Milestones can award a badge when they are reached, which is what turns a private counter into something visible in the community.
The leaderboard
Members see a leaderboard with their own rank, the top members, and the level distribution. It is the visible face of the whole system.
A leaderboard suits a community that enjoys competing. It does not suit every one: in a support community for people struggling with something, ranking them against each other is the wrong signal. You are not obliged to switch this on.
What your members see in the community
Switching it off later
Points and levels can be turned off, and the members who collected them will notice. Decide early, before people have a rank they care about, rather than after.
Watching it work
The analytics page shows points awarded and the distribution of members across levels. A distribution where almost everybody sits at level 1 means your thresholds are too high, not that your members are lazy.