This research in progress will try to understand the relationship between user influence and status of users in an online community. For online communities a major issue is how to continue to grow and sustain the viability of the community. Oftentimes online communities will gain popularity and then lose that popularity due to stagnation in the number of new users and loss of interest by current users. This research tries to understand how the status of the user plays in the influence of the high level users and the vibrancy of the online community. We measure the influence of the user by using a pseudo Hirsch index to measure the interest of the users posts and use the status of the user in the online community to gauge the user status in the online community.