You may have noticed a change to the status icons today. We used to have a developers group with a gear icon for Jive employees and key community contributors. The problem was that some people were confused about which people were Jive employees and which were key contributors (for example, jadestorm does great stuff for the community, but he does not work for Jive).
We decided to split the two groups and add fancy new icons.
Jive employees have the Jive megaphone.
Key community members / key contributors have an Ignite Icon
Everyone else has a status symbol with the number of bars indicating participation in the community over time.
Answering questions and helping people in the forums is a huge contribution (takes the load off the rest of us ). It is important to have active forum participants within any healthy community!!