Over the past couple months, many of you all have noticed a few members with the new Forum Leaders badge. This badge is given to active members who are passionate about the technologies in the forums they lead, and are willing to dedicate a significant amount of time and effort to community building in their forums. While many Forum Leaders are already Experts and Mentors in their areas, this is by no means a prerequisite to being nominated as a Forum Leader. As with the Expert and Mentor badges, Forum Leader candidates are carefully reviewed by the team before they are promoted. Nominees will also receieve a PM from a team member offering them the position.

As I mentioned above, Forum Leaders actively participate in community building within their forums. Some examples of this can include pinning important threads, starting and participating in discussions regarding the language and related technologies, and organizing fun challenges and competitions for members to participate in. They are evangelists for their languages. Forum Leaders also take part in keeping their forums organized. In order to accomplish this, Forum Leaders are given a set of moderation tools allowing them to perform actions like adding code tags, renaming titles to be more descriptive, moving and merging threads, and hiding questionable content for moderator review.