We have rolled out the next several levels of ranks for our forums.  These include 5-stars, One Big Gold Shiny Star, A Big Gold Shiny Star +1, A Big Gold Shiny Star +2, and the Super Cluster.  This takes us past 15,000 posts for one poster, so we DEFINITELY look forward to someone reaching the Super Cluster! 

Comments are solicited.

Arcade pinball scoring dйjа vu!

I always hoped to see more granularity at the lower end—you know, for us mere mortals. Perhaps a combination of stars and colors with breaks at every 100 posts up to, say, 2000. Then perhaps the scale could start to spread out.

At my current posting rate, I can look forward to earning my Golden Cluster in approximately 26 years. Chain Gang, here I come!

I look at most of the UBB forums out there where anyone with more than 70 posts has 4 stars (and they are usually so ugly!), and it just seems to have no value. Plus, we really wanted to think long-term by providing a ranking system that rewards people who are here two or three years from now.  The 5-star rank is relatively easy to achieve, but I don’t really expect anyone to hit the Super Cluster for years.  Heck, I don’t even expect ME to hit that kind of posting level for years. 

You need rank titles!

I did a little bit of math based on Bryan’s current posting rate.  In 2.51 years, he is projected to post his 15,000th message. 

It will take me 44.294 years (projected) to post my 15,000th message, but who’s counting?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Justin on 2001-10-26 17:46 ]</font>

As Justin and I discussed privately, we perhaps should not have unveiled all those new ranks at once.  In other words, had I added only the 5-star rank, at the same levels, there would be no attainability issues.

The main things are as follows:  We wanted our ranking system to be long-term, and we didn’t want our higher levels to be easily reachable.  We specifically wanted to have something for people to shoot for going way forward, as we intend for our forums to be around for a long time.

Also, the rate of posting has already been increasing as our membership has grown.  As there are more topics and threads being discussed, we all find we have more to say.

In any event, the ranks have been dropped to the 1-5 star ranks.  My apologies for the confusion! and consternation!

On 2001-10-26 15:58, someToast wrote:

At my current posting rate, I can look forward to earning my Golden Cluster in approximately 26 years. Chain Gang, here I come!

Hey that was 1/3 the reason I started the Late Arrivals thread ...

Oh, and if we get titles, I’d like “God of Thunder”, please.

On 2001-10-26 16:34, Bryan wrote:
I look at most of the UBB forums out there where anyone with more than 70 posts has 4 stars (and they are usually so ugly!), and it just seems to have no value.

Oh, I agree there, and UBB takes it too far in the opposite direction (although only 32 members—4%—have more than 70 posts) and TMO has better stars

At a 100-point step, six members would have attained five stars—a feat I feel not only worthy of all those stars, but also cash prizes and a free version of the Home Game.

The new scale looks good, but titles for each would be cool!

At some point I made a Dr. Seuss reference to Sneeches about all this. Pretend I made it again.

I missed this thread, but one thing I’d like to see is the same star system (nyuk nyuk) applied to Staff, Mods, and Specialists. Of course, they would be red, purple, and bronze.

Maybe in addition to the Big Star, so the ones that haven’t posted much still have the prominance of a star.

I mean, Bryan has what, 8 million posts now, and only *one* star?

Unfortunately, the “Special Ranks” of mods, staff, etc. don’t offer us that capability.  I am not sure if version 2.0 does, but I will look later.

[Pops up out of a trapdoor, clad in tights, a mask, and a cape with a camel insignia.]

This looks like a job for Perl Man! Faster than a speeding shell script! More powerful than dynamically scoped arrays! Able to leap complex regular expressions in a single bound!

[And no, I don’t know why a trapdoor would be clad in tights, mask, and cape, either.]

Has Perl Man been studying up on his side project of learning PHP?

phpBB is infinitely modifiable, fortunately, but it is also in PHP.

It’s not free, but WebCatalog is a slick server-side scripting package. It uses very fast RAM-based databases and runs on damn near every platform out there (started life as a Mac .agci, IIRC).

That’s what I used to knock out Bryan’s post counter as well as any other dynamic sites we’ve done in the past four years. All too soon I’ll need to be writing up a forum package in WebCat as well.