Experience and Achievements

Community · 9 min read

How XP is calculated, how levels reduce cooldowns, how leaderboards sort users, and which achievements are visible.

How experience works

Community XP is stored on the user and periodically reconciled from counted activity: feed likes received, forum likes received, profile likes received, confirmed bug rewards, and achievement XP bonuses.

Level uses a triangular threshold curve with a 100 XP step. Level 1 starts at 0 XP. Level 2 starts at 100 XP, level 3 at 300 XP, level 4 at 600 XP, and so on.

XP is cumulative. Leveling up does not spend or reset XP.

Earning XP

XP is awarded from two sources:

XP is only awarded to the content author, not to the person who gave the like.

Feed post likes: 10 XP to the feed post author.
Forum post likes: 10 XP to the forum post author.
Profile likes: 20 XP to the profile owner.
Confirmed bug reports: 50 XP to the author of the confirmed feed/forum item.
Achievement bonuses: one-time XP bonus defined by the achievement.

Cooldowns

Community level reduces interaction cooldowns. The base post cooldown is 12 hours. The base comment and profile-comment cooldown is 1 hour. Effective cooldown is the base cooldown divided by your current level.

The post cooldown is shared by feed custom posts and forum topics. The comment cooldown is shared by feed comments and forum replies. Profile comments have their own separate cooldown with the same 1-hour base.

Admins bypass interaction cooldown checks.

Leaderboards

Top users can be listed by experience, profile likes, or overall likes. The top-users endpoint caps results at 300 and uses experience and like counts as tie-breakers.

Leaderboards use public user fields: username, avatar, role, level, experience, profile likes, and overall likes.

Achievements

Achievements are one-time milestones attached to a user profile. Each achievement has a key, name, description, icon, rarity, hidden flag, availability flag, active flag, and optional XP bonus.

Visible available achievements that you have not unlocked are shown on your own profile. Hidden achievements are counted for you, but their details are not shown until unlocked. Other users only see achievements you have unlocked.

Unlocking an achievement can add XP and creates an achievement notification. Revoking an achievement removes its XP bonus when applicable.

Visible achievements

The visible catalog currently includes account, project, bug, and collection achievements:

There are additional hidden achievements for exports, projects, subscription tiers, collection quality/popularity, and special roles.

Hacker Hater: enabled MFA. Uncommon, 50 XP.
Perfectionist: performed 50 exports. Common, 20 XP.
Undecider: created 5 projects overall. Common, 20 XP.
Big Brother is Watching You: linked Google account. Common, 20 XP.
To support, right? Right?: linked Patreon account. Rare, 50 XP.
Scout: found 1 confirmed bug. Uncommon, 50 XP.
Hunter: found 5 confirmed bugs. Rare, 100 XP.
Terminator: found 10 confirmed bugs. Epic, 200 XP.
Dabbler: created your first custom collection. Common, 20 XP.
Tinkerer: created 5 custom collections. Uncommon, 50 XP.

Bug achievements

Confirmed bugs are counted from feed and forum content after a moderator marks the item as confirmed. The confirmed bug reward is 50 XP per confirmed item.

Bug achievements unlock at 1, 5, and 10 confirmed bugs: Scout, Hunter, and Terminator. Moderation behavior is documented in Notifications and Moderation.