Is the demise of Community Badges permanent?

[nyonomega0]

Hello Upwork,

I see that my 'Community Guru' badge has dispersed into nothingness. Is this permanent?

Thank You.

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Admin edit: Locking thread as it turned into a Stan AMA - We'll do a dedicated topic for that soon when I have a bit more time! -Stan

[StanG · Accepted solution]

Hey Sushant, we have retired the ranks as they existed before.  See anouncement here

We are working on a revamped rank/badging program that we plan to roll out over the coming months. With it, we'll include a lot more of the 'how' and 'why' behind each rank. Everything we do will take into account all past history though!  

[martina_plaschka]

I'm going to make a blanket statement and say that people don't care about these badges (except the newbies who think there is some reward involved), or how the forum looks, or any of that stuff. 

People care about the mess the job feed has become. It's an ugly awful place. Getting a constant stream of scam invitations feels intrusive and violating. It is causing me distress - maybe not as bad as being burglarized, but similar. 

I don't care one single bit about the forum and the improvements or whatever. Yes I can set my profile to private and not get invitations, I can filter out any jobs without hire. Many people will do that and lose business. New clients will wonder where all the freelancers are. 

Do something about that. I'd like to have a customer experience that is not that painful, ugly, vomit-inducing and just overall terrible. 

It does not seem reasonable to do anything else before this is solved. I don't care how many departments upwork has and that they do different things. Make all of them work on one thing only. Thank you. 

[etrusca]

Yes Martina, that's a good analysis.

[StanG]

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. It's really simple. 

[wescowley]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

I think her point, which I agree with, is that all of these cosmetic changes to the forums seem trivial compared to the chaos happening on the job board (which is kind of your core product) and in freelancers' invitations. Nothing else y'all do really matters until that is under control.

I get UW has multiple dev teams working multiple things in parallel—I spent a good part of my life herding cats in dev shops. But what we see is UW painting the walls while saying they're working on how to deal with the termites in them.

[StanG]

Nobody denies we have plenty of opportunities, and I can't offer much in terms of "proof" beyond the endless teams I am working with daily who are working hard to improve the entire Upwork experience. 

I want to get to us all to a place where our product and engineering teams feel comfortable coming in here to discuss all of this with you. It's hard to do that today, just as it is hard for some new users to come into Community today. That's why I am trying to interact in here much more, because I want to get educated with all that is happening in here, and not just be making changes blindly.

Part of resolving all of this involves us throwing some resources into revamping Community, which we'll continue to do. Our goal is you'll all enjoy the changes, benefit from it, participate and more. It's not for everyone, and that is alright. Coming into threads where we are talking about improvements we are making though, and conflating it with all else going on, doesn't do any good. 

[martina_plaschka]

Ok, Stan, let's just talk about cosmetic changes to the forum then. 

Fine. 

People getting scammed is not your personal problem. Unfortunately, it is mine. On weekends (scammers have day jobs?) I get up to 10 invites a day from scammers. 

Just looking through my job feed - 9 out of 10 are scams - makes me feel dirty and wanting to take a shower. Not your problem either. 

[a_lipsey]

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Stan G wrote:

 That's why I am trying to interact in here much more, because I want to get educated with all that is happening in here, and not just be making changes blindly.

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But you are making changes blindly. Let's take groups as an example. You've had a lot of feedback that we can't access them easily so it makes it difficult to participate. You've had feedback that the actual groups themselves are not necessarily serving what we need. Yet not only is that change live, it's being promoted on Upwork's social media as a new feature of the Community. 

What's also unclear to me is why you are making all these changes in a real world environment instead of a test system, why you really aren't seeking feedback, and why when you do get feedback, you dismiss it. 

I actually do appreciate you getting down here in the trenches with us, and I do think you've been brought in to do a job with a certain mandate, and that mandate might be slightly at odds with other Upwork team's mandates, which makes it hard to do what you'd like. That's the sense that I get anyway, and I understand the uphill battle that is. A few days ago you said "We are not the enemy." I'd like to turn that back to you. We, the freelancers who have built this community, are not the enemy. 

[StanG]

As I have hinted elsewhere, we're a fairly small team, but also very nimble - So we're taking a few different paths as we revamp Community. Groups for example - We have over 45 groups in Community right now. They are being leveraged through a variety of ways, but with launching all of that, we had to start migrating other programs into the fold. A lot of this was to prep for the upcoming relaunch on 4/20.  So we are seeing a lot of success, and have a lot of data and feedback showing as such, it's just outside the core forums here. (Sidenote - I'm still figuring out how much I can publicly share of our data, stay tuned).

Changes in real world env - Not at all. We actually have both a development instance as well as a staging instance. What we are running up against is a platform that has had almost a near decade of updates/enhancements, yet none of those were made to the Upwork community. So as we started rolling out updated features, we very much have been playing whack-a-mole. It wasn't one of those "Why touch it if it wasn't broke" - It was very broke, just nobody knew it.  When we roll out changes later this month, it's removing 100% of legacy code/hacks/band-aids built up over the years by multiple different third party vendors.

We're not dismissing the feedback, but we're asking for patience for all the above. Much of our team is new or in new roles, working on a outdated platform, while building out a (fairly) modern Academy,and soon to launch more. And again, transparently - A lot of this is not meant for the use cases that many of you in this specific thread are going to fit into, much of it is going to be geared towards those new to Upwork. You are already all experts on everything in that regard.

I'll see if we can write something up to give an overview of the state of the Community Team today, I don't think we have that public anywhere and it may be helpful, or you'll all tear it apart, but at least you'll have more context of what we are all doing here.

And I'll stop there as I could keep going - We are looking to setup some virtual sessions for folks who would like to join so we can actually chat real-time, otherwise we'll end up with me writing novels time and again.

[etrusca]

Participate to the forum can be useful (for example for asking help when something goes wrong in the platform), but it can't be the principal purpose. Working is the principal purpose of freelancers.

[martina_plaschka]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. It's really simple. 

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I know that. Maybe you haven't read my post? I was specifically saying that nobody cares about the looks or the titles. The content, on the other hand, provides a lot of entertainment. 

So, what are you going to do about the scammers?  

[StanG]

Sorry if my response came off snarky - My point was we all have roles in a company, simply taking resources from A and throwing it to B does not work. We're currently hard at working improving Community (which is much more than just the forums it traditionally has been), and there is going to be endless updates, new functionality and features, and changes that come with it.  We are not going to be able to please everyone of you.  With that said, if you don't like the work being done, that doesn't mean you need to continue to spin the conversation elsewhere.  We have more links than I could provide about that topic.

[gilbert-phyllis]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. It's really simple. 

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I feel confident speaking for many of us experienced, successful UW FLs when I saw we care about the forums very much, otherwise we wouldn't spend any time here at all. It's an authentic community where people swap stories, exchange tips and advice, and develop relationships over time. In the course of all that, forum participants provide two key services that I don't think Upwork has ever fully recognized, understood or acknowledged. One, we take up huge amounts of slack re. customer service, answering questions especially for newcomers. Two, many of our discussions generate instructive narratives that are a valuable resource for anyone who cares to take advantage of the archive. Many new FLs do--I know this because I get kudo's from time to time (several times a month) on old threads by brand-new FLs who are obviously doing the requisite homework to understand the platform before they jump in and start making potentially costly mistakes. I presume many of my colleagues get these, too. It pleases me, not because it's an ego trip but because it proves that time spent discussing and explaining issues that arise and various contingencies around how the platform works, is time usefully spent. When I first joined UW, the forum was a treasure trove of insights that helped me get up to speed and avoid costly mistakes.

What we don't care about are titles and badges, etc. And it's kind of meh-inducing to belong to an authentic community that is suddenly being overhauled with messaging like "We want to make a space for you to [do what we're already doing, thank you]." But we get it, UW has decided to focus on the Community and it's your job to manage it. Most of us also undesrtand there are undoubtedly parallel work streams in progress with different teams deployed and that it's not necessarily the case (probably isn't, at all) that the problems we think are most dire are competing for resources wiht Community Forum initiatives. But UW needs to understand our POV--that from where we sit, some of the problems are so dire they deserve an all-hands-on-deck response. It's UW's call, obviously, but we have certainly earned the right to express our viewpoints.

[yitwail]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

While you get paid to make snarky remarks? More power to you.

[petra_r]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. It's really simple. 

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I believe that response to be needlessly combative.

If you don't want to be seen as the enemy, don't treat us as if we are.

Many of us are passionate about both the forum and Upwork users in general, responses such as "If you don't like it, you can beep off already" from an Upwork employee (!!) are not helping. Not in the current situation where the platform is so severely compromised... or actually ever.

[a_lipsey]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. It's really simple. 

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Stan, you said you wanted to understand the community. And this comment needs to be apologized for.

Martina devotes an immense amount of her free time to helping people here - including, at times, being the SOLE person providing profile review to newbies on the profile review thread. She deserves to be taken seriously, and this remark seems disrespectful to her service here. 

[researchediting]

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Stan G wrote:

You spend a lot of time in the forums for someone who doesn't care at all about the forums. 

If you don't want to participate, you don't have to. It's really simple. 

---

So how's that downvote button coming along?

/s

[pgiambalvo]

Please get rid of 90% of the scam and spam posts in our feeds before spending any time on anything else.

[kfarnell]

What's the rationale behind removing them to leave the ranks empty for several months before they're replaced?

[StanG]

Simple transparent answer - It's easiest.

The longer answer is that we'll be rolling out an entirely new styling for Community later this month. It'll remove years of technical oddities built up over the years, and with that new fresh coat of paint, we'll be fixing a lot of things including how ranks/badges show up. So rather than build in temporary solutions and even more hacks to carry them over, this was a lot cleaner. Plus on our backend platform, it is tremendously easier to setup new ranks once the old ones are cleared out.

[kfarnell]

'Later this month' is different to 'over the coming months' - which is it?

And basically you're saying that new rankings are being introduced so people go 'oooh, look at the shiny new thing' and pay less attention to less fanfared changes? if you just stick on another coat of paint, you'll end up with thick paint rather than something that works better. 

[StanG]

We're planning on new styling/homepage tenatively going live 4/20/22. New ranks will come in the months after that. We don't have a set date yet.

To your point - We're technically burning the place down, building a new foundation, and building the first two foors. We're planning for the future though, and thus will still have construction going on floors 3-10, with plans for additional buildings in the future.

[gilbert-phyllis]

I get that the Community is your bailiwick and you're just the messenger for what these changes telegraph about UW's strategic choices. But you gotta let them know how frustrating it is for us to see all this investment here while we're contending indefinitely with glitches, bugs, and poltergeists on the work platform where we earn money. Random delays in message delivery. Interminably slow processing of updates like a client's address (so hiring me should be a matter of a minute or two but it's been over an hour so far--inconvenient and clumsy, unnecessary friction while trying to get a project underway with a new client who is using UW for the first time and will likely use it a lot unless he gets fed up). Whatever the issue that is keeping people from being able to leave fb when they close contracts. Honestly, it feels a little bit like leasing office space in a high-rise where the elevators break down at random and we're told the team is working on it, meanwhile, we're getting a complete renovation on the break room. Very nice, except we didn't ask for it and it doesn't help us earn money and delight clients. 

[pgiambalvo]

Good one.

[StanG]

I get the frustration. Our community team has a single engineering resource, and that's our lovely Djole who we simply stole away from his moderation responsibilities. Similarly, and pure honesty, it's also why some core features in community like Usernames not properly displaying have been postponed due to priorities elsewhere as nobody can argue this is more critical than the issues you highlight.

(I need to stop using analogies. You all destroy me at this). 

[feed_my_eyes]

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Stan G wrote:

Similarly, and pure honesty, it's also why some core features in community like Usernames not properly displaying have been postponed due to priorities elsewhere as nobody can argue this is more critical than the issues you highlight.

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I think that not having usernames on display is actually quite a high priority for people who used their real first and last names; much, much higher than whether we're called gurus or dinosaurs or whatever. 

[moonraker]

I'm for it in principal.

The 'Guru' badge had to be dropped - it was misleading.

[martina_plaschka]

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Jamie F wrote:

I'm for it in principal.

The 'Guru' badge had to be dropped - it was misleading.

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I specifically liked that part. 

[roberty1y]

Let's not lose any sleep over it. I can live without my Guru badge till they come up with some replacement. 

[feed_my_eyes]

I can live without it indefinitely.

[StanG]

For anyone interested, the ranks were setup as follows:

Guru: 

(posts - deleted_posts >= 150) && (page_views >= 200) && (registrationAge >= 129600)

Leader

(posts - deleted_posts >= 75) && (page_views >= 100) && (logins >= 50) && (registrationAge >= 43200)

Ace Contributor

(posts - deleted_posts >= 20) && (page_views >= 40) && (logins >= 15) && (registrationAge >= 14400)

We also had a series of ranks that moved a new user up over the course 0 minutes, 3 minutes, 60 minutes.  Nothing actually happened, they just kept getting new ranks 🤕

In the future, we're looking to do a lot more with ranks, even providing different avenues one could take to rank up - This is a completely made up one that I grabbed from the examples we have

(logins >50) && (registrationAge >= 259200) && ((((net_threads) + (net_replies*2) + (net_blog_articles*10) + (net_blog_comments) + (net_idea_threads*5) + (net_idea_comments) + (net_contributed_posts*5) + (net_published_tkb_articles*10) + (net_tkb_comments)) >=7000)||(overall_posts >10500)) && (((net_accepted_solutions*10) + (net_kudos_events_given) + (net_kudos_events_received*2) + (tagging_tag_count)) >=2800)

[ashrafkhan81]

I the new formula, I do not notice any weight being given to the "recent activity." 

If you are redoing it all, recent activity and recent interaction or at least logins should be weighted into the formula. If someone who qualified for a certain badge and did not log in for 2 years or did not participate on the forum, it should have some impact. 

That it will make the badge relative to participation and not just something static you keep forever once you qualify! 

Or perhaps, the logins>50 refer to recent logins between a certain period? 🤔

Just my 2 cents! 

[StanG]

Yes, we are looking into how we can add this in so that those in a rank will move up/down based on the activity levels. We're also trying to think through how we may have a few avenues to take into ranks - If you are a lurker who reads everything and primarily only engage via kudos, no reason we can't provide at least some ways to rank up through those means.  Ranking will provide a 'badge' next to your name (similar to mods/admins, or everyone had with dinosaurs).

Something entirely separate from ranks that we'll also soon roll out is "badges" - These are static achievements earned throughout Community (Created x topics, received X kudos, wrote X blogs). These would be retroactive so they'll apply for all your history over time. We'll probably have a bit more fun with these at times, but also have them tie into our Academy and Event teams. I relate them to Pokemon, gotta catch them all.

Again, this is an example only, it is not anything we are necessarily doing, but just to give an idea!

[jr-translation]

Forget about all the people spamming you with blog posts and articles. They will be just go around kudoing everything.

[StanG]

I'm more worried about folks debating if kudoing is a real word or not. As this was definitely a 6 month battle with my old team. Luckily we're going to soon change that to Upvote so it won't be a concern for long.

[a_lipsey]

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Stan G wrote:

I'm more worried about folks debating if kudoing is a real word or not. As this was definitely a 6 month battle with my old team. Luckily we're going to soon change that to Upvote so it won't be a concern for long.

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Stan, you will make my day if you tell me there's a downvote to go along with that upvote.

[wescowley]

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Amanda L wrote:

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Stan, you will make my day if you tell me there's a downvote to go along with that upvote.

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Yes, please!

[StanG]

No downvote. Enough research/studies seem to show it being used more as a tool by bullies / the negative mental health effects of those who do get downvoted is impacted enough, that it's not necessarily a positive tool to have.

With all that said, I liked having it on Youtube.

[wescowley]

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Stan G wrote:

I'm more worried about folks debating if kudoing is a real word or not. As this was definitely a 6 month battle with my old team. Luckily we're going to soon change that to Upvote so it won't be a concern for long.

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It's a word. I'm an editor, trust me. The dictionaries just haven't caught up yet (and probably never will). But thanks to this minor rabbit hole, I learned the word "kudize", which is in OED and I like better than "kudoing".