Top Contributors - What does this mean, and how is it calculated?

[Jonathan Twombly]

@Joshua Dorkin @Hilary C.

I'm a long-time user of the site, but was away for a while.  Now that I am back I see that the "Top Contributors" list has changed.  I really don't understand how this works, or what it means?  It's different depending on which posts I am reading.  Could someone please explain this?

[Scott Trench]

Top Contributors are the folks with the highest "Score" in a given forum.

For example, we are posting in the "Questions About BiggerPockets and Official Site Announcements" forum. The top contributor at the time of this writing is @Mindy Jensen, which is no surprise as she is our community manager and constantly posting great news about new features and important updates about BiggerPockets. She is also a legend. Mindy is NOT a top contributor at this moment in other forums like "Landlord forums and rental property questions" - she doesn't post quite as frequently as other folks in those forums.

While we don't want people to "game" the system by giving away the algorithm that calculates these scores, understand the scores factor in the number of posts one has in a specific forum and the number of votes that one receives on their posts in that forum. Only recent activity matters in this regard, so the guy with a few hundred posts is at no more advantage than the guy with thousands of posts. 

So, if you want to become a "top contributor" focus on delivering a large amount of quality content (quality as judged by the number of votes you receive from the community) in a specific forum that you want to rank in.