If you are a member of our Corrections Community and have asked a question or answered somebody's question in our forums, you will see that your Community participation statistics may have changed. This system is in place to encourage active participation and to provide an indicator for determining how long someone has been a member and how active they are in the Community. There are a number of ways that your participation is measured:

1. Top Contributors
There is a horizontal bar that appears under your name in your posts that indicates if you are a Top Contributor and at what level (Top 10, Top 25, Top 50, etc). This is simply based on the number of times you have posted in the forums compared to everyone else.

2. Number of Posts
This is the number of times your have posted a message in the Corrections Community. The more posts you have, the more likely you are to be listed as a Top Contributor.

3. Points
Points are a bit more complicated. It is important to understand that they measure the amount of member participation in the Community but do not measure the quality of the participation. Please respect those members with many points but do not ignore or downplay those with few points--they may simply be new members or members who do not regularly participate.

Points are assigned in the following way (although this may change):

• 5 points: Create a post
• 15 points: Anytime someone replies to one of your posts
• 2 points: For replies from a unique member (not multiple replies from the same person)
• 6 points: For each star that someone gives your post or thread
• 5 points: Each time someone else downloads something you've posted in the file library
• 100 points: If someone adds you as as a "favorite" member
• 1 point: For rating someone else's post, file, or blog entry

4. Peer Rating
Members can rate a variety of things in the Community.  Please feel free to show your support for a topic or item by rating its value to you.  Rating items helps indicate to fellow members what information has been found interesting or useful.

5. Mark As Answer
If you post a question or topic in a discussion forum, or if someone (or more than one person) answers your question, you can indicate which answer or answers did so by clicking on the "Mark As Answer" button.  This is a great way to help future readers of the Community.