Agreed totally. In order to have a title here, you need to be contributing to the community. Yes there are people who are talented coders in their own rights but have member titles because they don't release any codes here. IMO, if you are prepared to learn or already know a bit about coding for vB, then there is nothing stopping you releasing something back to the community, even if you need to ask some of the more experienced vB coders for help with some parts of it. That's the whole point of a community, IMO, sharing.

I prefeer keeping the status as they are today. If a coder comes and releases his work to the comunity, he should be "rewarded" with at least, a special rank like "Coder".

I've been here sinse 2002 and never released anything, I can barely code, and made awesome things to the boards I admin, but here @ vb.org I havent released anything and I am Happy being a "Member".

My 2 cents.

Well said, I have about 10 styles I would really like to share but haven't had the time to release them to the public.... Should I get a title for my intent... I don't think so. ;)

So what about the people who provide endless ammounts of support and help, why can't they have a title too? You don't need to know how to code in order to troulbe shoot a issue.

i like the title how they r, cant see a problem in them.

Do you want to crawl through every support thread and find out who supported who the most?
They can't have a title too because it's not measurable in the same way as a modification/design released.

I would be interested in seeing how you would be able to determine who got promoted to a usergroup based on question answering. (Which I thought was the reason for the default ladder system.)

I say this because you would first need to implement a new system on the site to allow users the ability to choose if their post is a question or an answer. I mean you couldn't just give it to users you feel deserve it because wouldn't that be biased? The only way around being prejudice in a system like that would to have it automated. To make it automated, the system would need to be able to read how many questions you have answered....successfuly. (Time to implement the reputation system..only modified maybe?)

The coder and designer titles dictate what users have done in regards to physical releases.

If you want to also implement a system for users that don't donate any work for installation, but do spend their time answering questions, go for it. I for one am not against it. I am just interested in how it would be determined who gets the promotional title.

How do you measure who provides lots of support? There will be a few names who crop up, but unless the person provided mountains of support every single day and so it picks up on.

I previously suggested changing titles such as senior member to senior contributing member & member to contributing member. I would be tempted to ensure that there is an entry level one just as member for something like < 150 posts. IMO when you get to 150 posts you are becoming established in the community here and as such are contributing to the site even if it is just by pointing other people in the right direction.

The other option would be using something like the thanks hack where users can be rted as helpful or not by the number of thanks that they have recieved. This could then possibly trigger promotions in the same way that installs does for coders/designers.

My point is, what do the users who give up their free time to get support get, even if they are not a coder or designer. Are their contributions to this site any less important than anyone eleses?

It would not be hard to do really if the will was there - just install something like the thank you system, or even just turn on the reputation system (disable the negative part, and disable it in non relevant forums) - and then have some titles based on how much people get thanked or repped for help.