Quote Originally Posted by thescot View Post
And if you somehow felt "excluded," I will personally assure you that you are welcome here, that you are full member, and that no one intends to exclude you from anything. See? You are not excluded at all. I can't imagine anything on this forum that a title--or lack of same--could possibly have excluded you from.
I suspect that after being around for all of 30 posts (as of this particular posting by you) you may not have a very good feel for the ambience of the place. There are many personalities, and, like a family, it has developed a unique and somewhat complex relationship between its members. Often times, "traditional" things like titles take on importance way beyond the literal. You see, we all know that none of us is really a samarai, but it was part of who we were.
I'm pretty sure people on this forum have been judged by how man posts they have and have been left feeling excluded.

Alrighty, anyway, I'll throw my 2 cents into this. I'm a member of another forum of an unrelated nature. The forum has almost 30,000 members. They do not use a standard ranking system. No one receives a "rank" until they have reached 1 years time and 1000 posts. At that time, they can then set their own title.

The board has a "welcome" section as well as games and a few others that are irrelevant to the board, these sections do not count towards post count. I should also mention that this forum uses the same software as ours. Just putting it out there that it's worked very well for them. People get a fun title of their picking once they have been around long enough and have contributed enough. Gives people something to look forward to without a lot of "Nice kilt" and "I agree" posts clogging up the works.