We rarely cover forum news about the forums themselves, so I figured I pull out one significant thing that happened in the forums over the past 24 hours that is really bothering some forum members. As you know, Google has newish help forums, which launched in October.

In the forums, each member is assigned a "level," which shows other members how active (helpful) a member is in a specific forum. The levels go from 1 to at least 5 and then there are "Top Contributors" who are assigned that status manually by the Googlers who manage the respective forums. Each forum has their own weights to determine the number of posts required to reach a new level.

In any event, over the past twenty-four hours, it seems like some member profiles were demoted from a high level, down to a level one. There are threads about this in virtually every Google help forum.

I figured I would highlight one thread, the one in the Google Webmaster Help where you have several members complaining about the bug. JohnMu of Google confirmed the bug and said:

Hi everyone,

We're still working on a fix, so those who are not Bionics will have to wait a little bit, sorry! I'll post more when I have it!

For what it's worth, this will not affect your site's crawling, indexing or ranking in Google. Nor it's PageRank. Just so you know :-)

John

I just find it so funny, because most people are worried about their Google PageRank. In this thread, they are more worried about their Google forum level rank then anything else. Good times.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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