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One of Helium's rewards for its writers is its star system: blue for writing and gold for rating. Writers earn peer recognition, a sense of accomplishment, and money when they have these little "status symbols" by their names.

Remember the thrill when you earned a "star" on your school paper? We never outgrow that thrill.

Helium tries to reward both quality and the number of articles a writer crafts with an ongoing revenue accruing system. Through stars, Helium recognizes "its most active and talented writers."

Although Helium is an instant publishing house, which means you can become a published writer with your own byline on Day 1 without screening requirements, there are benchmarks before you can earn stars.

Helium is a self-monitored Community of about 150,000 active members. If a member spots an article that breaks the rules - like self-promotion, inflammatory or adult content, or plagiarism - he can report it to Helium. For major faults, articles can be deleted. For minor faults, members can e-mail writers about simple errors, like spelling and grammar. All Helium members are asked to be courteous and kind in their communications.

How do you earn stars on Helium? At first, it sounds complicated, but broken down into steps, the whole pattern creates a considered and fair reward system.

Some people come to Helium and copy/paste a load of reprint items without reading the guidelines. That's acceptable. But Helium wants to encourage quality over quantity, so it weights the earnings to reward the better material.

A writer can earn his first star with only four articles, but they must be in "competitive titles" of three or more. "Orphans" or pairs of articles don't count. Ratings don't kick in until there are three articles to a title.

If you have 100 articles, but 76 are in non-competitive titles, you'd have to wait till someone joined "the singles (or pairs) club" before you'd get your star for 25 competitive titles.

As a break, Helium doesn't count the lowest-ranked 10% of the articles. But the other 90% of your articles must have an average rank at or above the 75th percentile. If they rank at the 85th or above, you earn a bonus star in each group, up to the limit of 5.

Creative writing earns badges, not stars, so those articles do not get included in the count. Most mixed-channel writers benefit from this concession: the Creative Writing channels often draw hundreds of writers to one title, which makes it difficult to be in the top quarter.

Helium provides a chart

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