Studs are points on the Brickcentral community. It's kind of a scoreboard for your activity on the forum.

You earn them automatically by using the forum: logging in, creating topics, commenting, replying to comments, etc.

You can also earn them by earning badges.

Once you hit certain stud amounts, you can unlock special features like:

1. having an Instagram feed on your forum profile
2. getting your own shortened URL to your forum profile (where all your badges are displayed) for your Instagram bio
3. being able to nominate other LEGO photographers for features