Yes this forum is literally friendly and except you have immoral acts you don't have to worry about anything and same is it for BTT though this is somehow more less strict.
Ranking up is actually easy all you have to do is to make quality post avoid burst posting and soon you see yourself in among the higher ranks I guessed what usually affects others might be the urge to have more karma which has now lead to trying to get smart but in the end fooling themselves to get a negative tag or karma points deduction. Where as if they don't bother to think about it they will easily themselves earning karma since it really easy to get them while if it doesn't come they just still have to keep things good.
Most newbies have the problem of not wanting to learn instead, they want to rush to rank up and make a lot of posts everyday. What good is it to rank up without the necessary knowledge? At least one or two posts a day is fine; just concentrate on learning.
I don't know about other forums, but I have to admit that this is the friendliest place to learn about cryptocurrencies.
Newbies should take their time learning and once they have the knowledge and start creating a quality post, karma will start chasing you instead of rushing themselves to search for positive karma.
And to rank up in this forum is not hard as bitcointalk. Here you done need to have enough karma to rank up. In fact karma is not even among the requirements to rank up an account. If any newbie is serious and commenting on people's posts and creating good threads without spamming and plagiarism allegations and if the person can post 5-10 every day then it is easy for him to rank up. And they don't have to rush the account if not him go enter wahala. Time is coming this forum will still do well.