MatPilot Help CenterOpen in the MatPilot Help Center →

Help Center › Members & Profiles

Kudos: how members thank each other

Updated

Kudos are short compliments members give each other after training. A partner who went light with a beginner, the person who is always first on the mat, the one who explains an armbar until it clicks: kudos are how that gets said out loud without anybody having to make a speech.

They are off until you turn them on. Settings, then your academy, then Kudos.

What a member does

Open Colleagues, type a training partner's full name, and choose one of ten compliments:

Friendly · Disciplined · Warrior · Technical · Welcoming to new people · Always early · Goes light · Never gives up · Calm under pressure · Explains well

That is the whole list, and it is deliberately fixed. Free text would need moderating, and a fixed list cannot carry an insult dressed as a compliment.

Five a day, three of which can be anonymous. The same compliment to the same person only once a month, so a tally is built by a room rather than by one enthusiastic friend.

Signed or anonymous

You tap a partner Pick one of ten compliments Signed (the default) Your name rides with it They hear now A notification naming you Anonymous (optional) Nothing links it back to you, ever They hear Sunday A weekly count. No kind, no day What no kudo ever carries Who gave an anonymous one The night it happened A way to reply

A signed kudo arrives straight away with the giver's name on it. That is the default, because most people want the person to know it was them.

An anonymous one is genuinely anonymous. Nothing stored against it points back at the giver, and the recipient is not told when it arrived: anonymous kudos surface only as a weekly count on Sunday evening, naming no compliment and no day. A kudo that landed on Tuesday and told you so would be a kudo you could trace to whoever you rolled with on Tuesday.

What shows on a profile

On a profile Goes light · 4 Explains well · 3 Counts only, never names and never dates. A compliment appears once it reaches two, so a single one can never be traced to one session. Anonymous ones are folded in overnight. If they turn it off nothing shown Anyone can hide their kudos from their profile with one switch, and still receive them. A hidden tally looks exactly like a member who has none yet. Nobody can tell which it is.

Counts. Never names, never dates, and never the individual kudo.

A compliment appears on a profile only once it has reached two. One kudo stays private to the person who received it, for the same reason: a lone count that appeared the morning after a session points at whoever was in that session. Anonymous kudos are folded into the visible number overnight rather than the moment they are sent, so nobody watches a counter tick after class and works backwards from it.

Every member sees their own full tally on their profile: the total, every compliment they have received, and the signed ones with the names attached. A switch there hides the whole thing from their public profile while still letting them receive kudos, and a hidden tally is indistinguishable from a member who simply has none yet.

What this is for

An academy runs on things that never get said. The blue belt who slows down for a nervous white belt is doing the most valuable coaching in the room and nobody is watching. Kudos give that a place to land.

For an owner they are also a reading of the room you cannot get from attendance. A member with a lot of Welcoming to new people is the person to pair with a nervous trial. A member with none of anything, over months, in an academy where kudos are flowing, is worth a quiet word before they quietly stop coming.

Owners and coaches receive kudos too, from anyone who trains with them.

Turning it on

Settings, then your academy, then Kudos. It is off for every academy until an owner turns it on, and nothing about it shows to anybody before then. Turning it off later leaves everything already given intact and simply stops it being shown.

Finding someone, and who can be found

You type a full name First and last, as the academy has it Exact match only Half a name returns nothing at all One person Never a list Who cannot be found this way Anyone who switched themselves off the list Anyone either of you has blocked Under-18s — they receive kudos only from staff Coaches and owners keep the full roster: reaching every member is their job.

There is no list of everybody at the academy. A member reaches a training partner by typing that person's full first and last name; a partial name returns nothing, so nobody can page through your roster reading names, belts and photographs. Coaches and owners keep the roster, because reaching every member is their job.

Two people cannot be found this way at all. Anyone who has switched themselves off the list stays off it even for someone typing their name exactly. And children and teenagers cannot be looked up by other members: a minor receives kudos only from an owner, a manager or a coach. Anonymous attention from the adults a child trains beside is a different thing from two adults thanking each other, and it cannot be traced afterwards. Staff can still send a young member kudos, because that is a coach noticing something.

Kudos carry no free text, no way to reply and no way to start a conversation, which is what makes the rest of it safe: there is no channel here for anything to be said that the list does not already say.