[Robert]

I have just demoted all members Actually, I thought I did this a while back but I got the titles and the ranks out of sync. With more members on the website I thought it necessary to re-normalize the belt promotion requirements to make the promotions a little more difficult to achieve. Below are the ranking requirements:

Posts Title
0 - 4 In Training
5 - 9 White Belt
10 - 19 Yellow Belt
20 - 49 Orange Belt
50 - 89 Green Belt
90 - 139 Blue Belt
140 - 199 Brown Belt
200 - 279 1st degree Black Belt
280 - 359 2nd degree Black Belt
360 - 439 3rd degree Black Belt
440 - 599 4th degree Black Belt
600 - 799 Master
800 - 999 6th degree Black Belt
1000 - 1199 7th degree Black Belt
1200 - 1399 8th degree Black Belt
1400 - 1999 9th degree Black Belt
2000 - Grandmaster

Wondering why I use belt ranks as titles? It's because of my background in the martial arts when I had to go through a number of these promotions myself. I'm mostly retired now. I got tired of the injuries and thought I better preserve my body better. Plus this website takes up all my time now.

Also, you may have noticed that all new members are now placed in the 'Registered Users' usergroup which has more limited website access, access to fewer resources, and fewer privileges. Once a member has entered 5 posts and has a reputation of 5 or greater (starting reputation is 10), the member is automatically promoted to the 'Initiated Members' usergroup and receives a belt rank based on post count. Any member whos reputation falls below 5 is moved back to the 'Registered Users'.

This protects the website from the non-comitted and the spammers who sometimes waste or abuse the website's resources.

[mkirkpatrick]

Thanks once again Robert,that seems to make sense to me,keeping those spammers
out seems a full time job!

regards michael.