Believe it or not, we already have a number of classes implemented but hidden.. people have been leveling up for some time now without knowing it. ;) We've kept them hidden because we wanted to let the reputation system work for a bit before we rolled this out. We also wanted to attach some special bonus stuff you get (including expanded powers to do things on the site) with achieving certain ranks.

Here's your levels:
Author: Level 1 - Tutor
Moderator: Level 2 - On Patrol
Scholar: Level 1 - Reader
Participant: Level 1 - Lounge Lizard

We're actually working on these plans right now. We want to do a few major things for Gamedev.net's community over the coming months and these improvements are a big part of our discussion. Some of the big ticket items are rep improvements, bringing back sweet snippets (where you can get points for posting cool game related source code.. no big article necessary, the code speaks for itself), and a dramatic improvement in our publishing platform. oh.. and search, search, search.. that will be critical. It has to be super easy to quickly locate articles both through google and our site search, filter through articles and tags, subscribe to the type of stuff you want to see..

We have an awesome opportunity (all of us) to bring together the game development community and create a great resource depot.. so much stuff is scattered across the net now on various blogs and misc. sites. We can create something really special for game developers if we build it together. What is most important is realizing that it's not going to necessarily be the experts that build this, but thousands of regular folks with a passion for this craft willing to put their work out there for the greater good.

I would love to drop banner ads and minimize that top interface if the community is willing to carry us. With this many people it's time we get to work showing how powerful and rewarding it can be to help someone.