Encouraging user engagement & investment using vBulletin

[alexwagner]

Hello,

I am creating a community forum for my clients.
This forum will be part of a monthly paid membership, and so encouraging user engagement & investment is very important, so that people stay members for a longer time.

I would like to model certain user engagement tactics used by: http://stackoverflow.com/about

Among other, Stack Overflow has these social tactics:
- Users earn social "reputation points" when others vote for or "like" their posts
- The more a post is voted for, the higher it rises in the discussion thread, such that the more valuable posts appear on top. This also encourages high quality replies.
- Users can earn a large number of social "merit badges", relative to their acheivements on the forum, like: http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges

Does vBulletin allow for this kind of social rewarding of user engagement?

In what other ways can vBulletin encourage user engagement?

Thank you for your help.

[imedic]

You should look for a mod or something as the forum merit system is basic (didn't check the latest 5.x version). I have 3.x and 4.x and it both require additional mods to engage users. www.vbulletin.org should help with mods.
Good luck.

[Joe D.]

vBulletin 4 has Reputation where users can leave positive (or, if allowed, negative) comments that add to (or deduct from) and overall reputation value. The overall value is displayed as a green (or red) bar of "pips" under the avatar.

vBulletin 5 has turned the Reputation system into a more basic "Likes" system (based on user demand) - there are no more comments or negative (dislikes) allowed and the more Likes someone has the more red pips they have below their avatar as you can see here.

Both versions of the software have a built in "Ranks" system which would allow you to give some sort of text or graphic badge based on the usergroup a member belongs to. You can assign usergroups from a built in promotions system where users can be moved or added to additional groups based on # of days registered, #of posts, or amount of reputation.

Those are the limits of the built in engagement tools. There are many mods on vBulletin.org (for free) that can give you additional tools. Many more for VB4 than VB5 at this time.