0-50: newbie
50-100: needs-a-life
100-150: CDA member
150+: custom title

CDA= Chief Delphi Anonymous

Seeing as how it would take most people a year to reach 50 posts on the old forum, I think that the first milestone should be 20 posts (or at least something smaller). After that, I would suggest the next milestone to be 100 and then 200.

Possible sequence: Rookie, Vetran, First-a-holic

Based on the experiences I have had at other forums, getting that custom message is quite a milestone, enough that it causes people to post too much. To alleviate this, would it be possible to not make the custom message occur at a specific number of posts, but when a moderator thinks that a person has earned the right to stand out from the crowd?

This would keep people from posting too much just to get the custom title. It would also reward the people who spend thier time hear making meanifull responses.

In other words, you wouldn't get a custom message by only posting in the chit-chat forum ;)

Progress Bar
 

How about using a progress bar to indiciate a user's standing in the forum...

it could get a little wider every 10, or so, posts and would be replaced by a custom title after 150....

i could very well be wrong, but from what i understand its not possible for the user titles to be for any ranges other then the 0-50, 50-100, 100-150, 150+...or is it?
does anyone know the answer to this?

I've seen the same thing happen on forums I frequent...so much so that often the admin has just let everyone have a custom title from the moment of registration. It helps solve the issue of "title-envy". Though if you want to do the graduated system with post number, I'd have to say I think Joe's ideas are the best.

~ lora

Those are the forum's default values, but an edit to the templates can easily make this customizable to anything the admin wants.

yea

if we got real creative i could specify it for each individual post :)

the admin area lets me choose 'once user hits X #of posts, their title is _________'

Image titles...
 

If it is possible to use a image as your title you could do this:[list=1][*]Make a table and decide how wide you want the maxiumum so be (say 200 pixels)[*]Make a picture of a star and make it 40 pixels wide[*]Set that star pic as the background of the table (it should tile exactly 5 times, making 5 stars)[*]Use the # of posts the person has to set the length of the table; say you decide 200 posts = 5 stars, then all you have to do is use the number of posts as the width of the table! (Say you want to make 300 posts = 5 stars, then you need to multiply the number of posts by 300/200 or 1.5 before using that to set the width of the table)[/list=1]
I think that would be really cool because people would have say one star, and then a portion of another and it shows an image representation of how many posts they have.
With the numbers I used above,

• 1 star = 40 posts
• 2 stars = 80 posts
• 3 stars = 120 posts
• 4 stars = 160 posts
• 5 stars = 200 posts

Oh, then after you reach past 5 stars, you can start getting into leutenant, general, colonel, and all that stuff with different pictures for each one

I agree with someone else
 

I agree with whoever said that. If there is a goal number, people will be just saying stuff just to put raise their status. It would make things too complicated. Those numbers are kind of high. Just my opinion.

I disagree
 

Yes, I have seen some of the stuff people have done on other forums to increase their status (create threads then proceed to post "spam" 400 times in them (BAD :o )), but I highly doubt we'll find anyone on this forum who will stoop to that level. This is not exactly a public internet community like most places where random people can do whatever they want and no one will ever meet them face to face, so they don't really care. Here, almost everyone knows everyone else and has seen them in person, so it's very unlikely people will do that. And even if they do, Brandon has complete control over this forum so there can be consequences. Plus, if you notice, at the bottom right corner of each post there is a link that says "report this post to a moderator". Random posters beware...

Also, those numbers I came up with were off the top of my head and can be changed really easily, heres another example:

• max table width = 100 pixels
• table height = 20 pixels
• star image width = 20 pixels
• star image height = 20 pixels
• 100 posts = 5 stars
• table width = #ofPosts

that way:

• 1 star = 20 posts
• 2 stars = 40 posts
• 3 stars = 60 posts
• 4 stars = 80 posts
• 5 stars = 100 posts

As you can see, these numbers can be easily customized.

[EDIT] Here is an example of one of these bars. It's not a table, it's a picture, but this is what one of them would look like. In this example, someone has 34 posts, one full star (20 posts) + a portion of another (14 posts):

Re: I disagree
 

dont spam in these forums...its not good

that might be a bit harsh for random posting, especially since theres a whole forum practically dedicated to it (chit-chat)
however...if anyone were to spam on these forums, reporting them to a moderator is certaintly an appropriate course of action

maybe if the moderators notice someone who seems to be doing a lot of random posting they could send him or her a private message or email or something and tell them to cool it

Mike's randomness posting
 

Mike, The Chit-Chat forum is for Off-topic discussions. That does not mean random posting of stuff. There is still something to talk about and not ramdonness like you post, Mike. That also goes with Andrew Kostka.

i dont post much random stuff anymore...or at least not too much
im being good...i swear!