Ability to be promoted to Regular for members

This is a topic that has been often request, and always ignored and dismissed.

Ever since the ability to be promoted to regular was suspended, devforum has increasingly became more aristocratic. With forum social mobility dead, and the powers that be deaf to any resentment or suggestions, it is no wonder that regular members of this forum are growing in discontent not being able to become a “regular” member just because it has been so dictated.

Regulars who already have the role on the dev forum are happy with the fact that they are in this special elite “club” that no others can enter, and devforum staff do not see the need of bringing on board a new system because it is too much work on their part. This only leads to the suffering of the majority who are members being silenced, and any chance of a voice they have removed.

They are not only unable to report any bugs they have, but they are also barred from ever having that privilege. They are not only stopped from being able to access channels to socialise with other devs, but they are permanently unable to even see themselves in such a situation as mobility to the “regular” rank is stopped.

There has been many suggestions previously regarding ways of adding back a system, but I believe we are missing out the point of the discussion.

It is not about how we can add a system for members to be promoted, the fact of the matter is that we need to communicate to the staff that we need a way for regular members to be able to be promoted to regular.

Each time a member adds a suggestion for staff to add in a way for regular promotion, it is instantly shut down by existing regulars who do not want others in their club. Flaws of their system is cherry picked out and any virtues completely ignored.

If you suggest a way that includes staff reviewing, the response would be “staff are too busy to review everything.”

If you suggest a way for regular promotion that does not include staff reviewing, the response would be “that is too easily exploited.”

If you suggest a way that makes it easy for people to be promoted to regular, you’ll be attacked for “letting in trolls and ruining the quality of the forum.”

If you suggest a way that makes it hard for people to be promoted to regular, people will just say “then there’s no point of having it if it is so hard.”

That is why, the argument should not be about how something like it would be implemented. The discussion should instead be centred on whether there should or should not be a system for regular members to have the rank they deserve.

This is because, when there is a will there is a way. If the whole forum and its staff can agree that we do need a system for member promotion, then working out a fair system would not be hard. But if we are always discussing on how to implement it, the opposition can have such an easy day of just picking anything apart because of one thing they do not like.

I know this topic may receive heavy criticism as there still exists the ultra conservative regular members who are scared of losing their uniqueness of showing off their rank. But that does not mean we should not put this issue out there. The issue that members are having their voices removed, and not even given the ability to ever be heard. It will soon be a whole year where members weren’t able to be promoted. I genuinely feel sorry for all those who were cheated out of their deserved rank.

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You’re being very dramatic. If you had used search and read any of the endless threads about this with the intent to understand, you would understand that of course everybody already knows and agrees there is a problem and that obviously there needs to be a way for members to transition to regulars, or else there needs to be another way to control quality in bug reports and feature requests separate from the rank system. You would understand that it is not a simple as any of the solutions people have proposed if you had taken time to do this. That is why they are always shot down.

Unfortunately you seem to have fallen into the trap of assuming things are the way they are exclusively to maliciously inconvenience you and others, and blinded everything explaining the situation so you can support your own annoyance. It would be good if you could try a little harder to understand why people are saying what they are. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the feedback. The way we’re thinking about this is not “how do we get people promoted to the next rank” but instead “how do we remove any need for ranks at all”.

At the time of writing there is currently already no difference between trust levels when it comes to forum access, all access has moved to group-based permissions instead of by trust level.


For #bug-reports access, we now have a path forward due to the Big Bug Reporting Update.

Everybody here in the current topic that made a post or Liked one of the posts (as of Mar 19) has had their join request to AllowBugReports accepted if they submitted one.

For everybody else that participates here later than this reply, please follow the instructions in the linked announcement above on how to get your join request in. We are slowly accepting people from the backlog to make sure we don’t overwhelm internal teams, but it is our goal to clear out the backlog. It will take us some time before we’re caught up with requests so appreciate your patience here.

This resolves the issue for all bug reporting categories.


For the feature request side of the matter, I am consolidating the threads into one thread, namely this one: All forum users should have a path forward to be able to post in feature requests - #154 by Hooksmith.

Please check out the update I posted there for further information. I will close this thread so that all further discussion is centralized in the thread above.


For #lounge access we will have a dedicated update at some point with more information. The Lounge category is currently not actively used by the forum community at all and there is not really any benefit of having access to it.


Thank you for posting this and for your patience so far as we work through these issues!

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