This thread from a Community Manager should answer your questions.
AARP - About Our Community: Community Ranking Structure
From the link:
User ranks are an entertaining community element that encourage participation while rewarding quality and establishing reputation. Every member in the community is assigned a rank based on various factors. Your rank is based on your engagement in the community, but it's not just how often you post, helpfulness and the value of your contributions also affect your ranking.
The best way of earning a higher ranking is to visit our community often and talk to other members. Here are a few ways to advance your ranking:
- Posting and replying to other people's posts
- Giving and receiving kudos on posts
- Marking a post as an Accepted Solution or having a post marked as an Accepted Solution
- Days of participation
We have 21 different rankings in our community with 6 of them being passive and the rest engagement oriented. Here is a better picture of what that structure looks like and how you can rank up:
Newbie is a member that has newly registered on AARP and has viewed messages in the community.
Visitor is a member that has progressed in their registration age and starts viewing more messages. They become a Regular Visitor as they consume more posts and login on a regular basis.
Info Seeker (Info Seeker +, and Info Seeker ++) is a member that’s consuming even more content and viewing other people’s posts on a regular basis.
Contributor (Periodic Contributor, Regular Contributor, Trusted Contributor, and Super Contributor) is a member who is starting to engage and become active in the community by replying to messages, and giving kudos. It’s possible a person can escalate from newbie to contributor very quickly.
Conversationalist (Bronze Conversationalist, Silver Conversationalist, and Gold Conversationalist) is a member who is starting conversations, giving kudos and tagging their posts.
Social Butterfly (Regular Social Butterfly, Recognized Social Butterfly, Trusted Social Butterfly, Esteemed Social Butterfly, and Honored Social Butterfly) is a member who is tagging their posts, being recognized by others via kudos, and others are accepting their posts as solutions.
In a nutshell, members that are consistently active have the best chance of achieving a higher rank!
It's Always Something . . . . Roseanna Roseannadanna