Shopsmith Forums

Folks:

I am honored that I have (rather rapidly) achieved the rank of "gold member". Or is that "Goldmember", with a wink to you Austin Powers fans?

Which raises at least two questions:

1) What exactly did I do to earn this honor? My feeble contributions are in no way even remotely comparable to the guys that have been unofficially nominated for "Platinum" membership. And ...

2) Given that this is a woodworking forum, why are the membership levels named after metals? Wouldn't it make more sense to have, perhaps, Pine, Oak, and Walnut levels? (Personally, my favorite is cherry, but then that can be found pretty cheaply around these parts. Hey, that's one more reason to like it, right!)

I don't recall for sure but I think Gold status is like 20 posts or more... silver is like 19 to 8 posts and bronze is below that. I'm not sure why they even have that as part of the forum.

But congratulations you are golden.

Ed

I think the membership level deal is a built-in feature of the templates for these sorts of forums when they are set up and I'm guessing you can't completely disable it, so whoever set up this site did the minimum in terms of levels and made it a small # of posts to get to the "top". This essentially makes them meaningless so there are no "class wars" and everyone who participates beyond the "asked a couple questions and never returned" level are all on a level playing field. I agree it would have been fun if it had been set up with a more meaningful set of levels named after wood but then again, on other forums I'm on some folks take the stars and/or level names and membership status names way too seriously. As a result, I do feel there is something refreshingly simple about this forum.

dgale wrote:I think the membership level deal is a built-in feature of the templates for these sorts of forums when they are set up and I'm guessing you can't completely disable it, so whoever set up this site did the minimum in terms of levels and made it a small # of posts to get to the "top". This essentially makes them meaningless so there are no "class wars" and everyone who participates beyond the "asked a couple questions and never returned" level are all on a level playing field. I agree it would have been fun if it had been set up with a more meaningful set of levels named after wood but then again, on other forums I'm on some folks take the stars and/or level names and membership status names way too seriously. As a result, I do feel there is something refreshingly simple about this forum.

I agree with this statement. It seems to be automatic even though you may have sufficient posts that would suggest that your member be severed before it became gold.

Lincolnsonline.com has a different system that is based on members making recommendations. Contact DaKat, the Administrator, if you want more information. But who really cares. If you are looking for online status from a website you need someone in your life who cares for you. I don't know how to tell you to get that but it won't be from the internet.