While some communities will show the rankings in a table, best practice suggests it's not a good idea to reveal how to get to a certain rank as some users will try to game the system. I personally also don't think its wise to show the ranking names as it removes the element of surprise and delight when a user is notified that they have ranked up.
Julie will be able to tell you whether ranking up here on the Lithium Community offers perks, but I don't believe so.
Gosh, best practices are to come up with a bunch of rankings, give them cool names, notify people when they've "ranked up," and display them on their profiles....but not say what they are, or even what order they're in, let alone how to achieve them.
Hi @wittier Jason is correct regarding best practices and that on our community, moving up in the rank structure will not open up new permissions. Additional permissions/perks are granted based on the account status: customers, partners, employees or Lithium Stars, will have more/different permissions than other community members.
You can see the list of your ranks in Community Admin → Users → Ranking. The ranks are achieved based on various algorithms. For lower ranks, you may want base it on time since registration, amount of logins, etc. Higher ranks can be based on the number of posts, accepted solutions and received kudos, but there are many options.
Stephen is referring to how you can see your own community's ranks (and potentially edit/add to them).
But as previously mentioned, here on the Lithium Community the list of ranks is not shared with the community.
Regarding motivation, it's certainly a valid opinion that you would find a list more motivating. Everyone is different. But generally I think that most people are more motivated by the surprise element - once you know what all the ranks are (and especially if you know how to achieve them) there is less "pull" to try to rank up to see what the next level is. I'm sure Mike Wu has covered this topic on his excellent blog - http://community.lithium.com/t5/Science-of-Social-blog/bg-p/scienceofsocial
