I had a thought and decided to share, please vote in the poll above after reading! Back when MSGlobal was just getting hot, the cool place for every angsty 13 year old was NSider, a forum run by Nintendo of America. At its height, it was undoubtedly one of the most popular websites for video games (including MS, which was quite popular on those boards) on the internet with over 40,000,000 posts all-time. The website went down rather unexpectedly and many who once posted there as a kid still vaguely remember the days of coming home after school, watching G4 and eating dunkaroos with a lachrymose fondness. In the same ways many of us play on this server to relive a small part of our childhoods, I thought it would be cool to suggest one of the things that made NSider a lot of fun: forum ranks. Those forums had ranks that were tied to three main categories (total posts [I'd recommend 'Likes' instead of just posts to curb spam], account age & page views) and, every time you ranked up, your forum screen name would change colors to match the rank to which you had aspired. I don't know if this is something that this forum's software would support, but the name differences looked very similar to how GMs/Staff's names look - bolded and in a different color. Here's a list of those ranks and here's a link to the Wayback Machine to see what these forums looked like. You can see that senior posters eventually had their names bolded, etc. The also had a special rank, similar to our Donor tags, called Sage. Sages had a cool little pixelated icon next to their forum name (like forum mods/GMs have) and were picked by the NOA staff. These could be designations for some of the server's most popular, helpful & friendly community members. Anyway, if this forum's software supported it and anyone got behind it, we could have a similar system wherein ranks were achieved through Likes & positive forum interactions. Ranks could go something like this: Green Snail Blue Snail Red Snail Orange Mushroom Horned Mushroom Zombie Mushroom Lioner Golem Mushmom Pac Pinky Dreamy Ghost Thanatos Balrog Krexel Zakum Horntail You get the idea. The higher you go, the cooler the ranking. If it ever got popular, you could do little icons next to the highest ranked ones to really help the forum's all-stars stand out. Donors would have the option to pick either their forum rank or their donor tag. It could help new players establish who reputable leech/equip sellers are, among other benefits! This is the premiere MS server - it would only be fitting to have the premiere forum to go along with it!
I don't know how this was never implemented so far. It's such a great idea... But there should be a way to not count the posts from lounge area... People would spam there for ranks.
Back when we using vBulletin we did have forum ranks very similar to this using monster names, however it did not change your username colour/formatting nor give you a special icon, and basically did the same thing Xenforo does with its 'Member', 'Well-Known Member' ranks. I believe we simply didn't ever bother doing the same when we made the moved to Xenforo. Xenforo currently doesn't support changing usergroups (what changes your username colour/icon) via likes, and it can be done only via posts. The same applies for the forum ranks themselves (below the username). I also don't think that CSS markup can be applied to forum ranks natively either. We will be uprading to Xenforo 2.0 in the near future so our best bet is to probably revisit this after the upgrade is done.
About changing the name tag color, I understand it's rather too hard or almost impossible to apply. But if the changes are only to the undertag, would it still be difficult?
