Post Counts & Ranks

A forum community that has perhaps been my favorite over the past several years has it so that your post count accumulates even if topics you have posted in are later deleted, reflecting how many posts you have made since you registered rather than how many are presently floating around. The nice thing about that is that it shows people how much you have contributed (hypothetically; perhaps "contributed" should be in quotation marks) to the community, even if that has not been recent contribution.

However, with phpBB bulletin boards, post count does not work that way. It instead reflects the number of your posts presently floating around somewhere. If you have made ten posts during the past two weeks and five of the oldest posts end up deleted when their topics get removed, your post count would reflect the five remaining posts rather than the ten that you've made since you registered. I have seen many folks passionately believe this to be the right way of doing it, but I also have found folks that feel the other way is better, and I guess that depends on what you feel the post count really should reflect. Either way, this is the way it is, as this is a phpBB2 board (as of the time of this writing, though I can switch to phpBB3 if I want though it works the same way).

So, if your post count mysteriously drops, that is probably why (older posts probably got deleted). To compensate for this method in phpBB, I have modest post requirements set for forum ranks. The idea behind this arrangement is that it reflects how much or how little members presently contribute to the community, so a member that is posting regularly and frequently will likely be seen with a higher user ranking than one that rarely posts.

• Level 0 - 0 to 9 posts
  
• Level 1 - 10 to 24 posts
  
• Level 2 - 25 to 49 posts
  
• Level 3 - 50 to 99 posts
  
• Level 4 - 100 to 199 posts
  
• Level 5 - 200 to infinity
  
  
• Moderator - special rank
  
• Administrator - special rank

Note on Moderator and Administrator status:
These statuses are not handed out liberally. We do not intend to have most of the community in a moderator or administrator position and such is unnecessary. Asking for promotion to one of these ranks looks bad and pretty much guarantees that the status will not be awarded now or ever. Administrator status will likely never be granted to anyone other than myself as promotion to this level would for me be purposeless, and promotion to moderator status would depend on need for moderators and a judgment on who might "fit the bill".

Yay! I reached level 1 a minute ago!

I have modified the ranking scale. Previously it was a five-star scale, with Level 0 posters having zero out of five stars and Level 3 users with three of five, and then moderators and administrators having four and five stars respectively. I didn't like the way the stars looked, so I made new rank images. I started making the stars different colors for different ranks: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. That would have been nice in that this would give green stars to moderators, which are already represented with green font, but this would have given blue stars to administrators which are represented with blue font. I wanted blue font for Admins but links are blue font by default so they would appear unremarkable in blue font. So, I added two more levels, making it a seven-star ranking system, with dark green stars for Mods, which are also in green font, and gold stars for Admins, which are in gold font. This means that regular users now have six ranks, from 0 to 5.

I like the new system better. Good job!

I like it better too.