Wow, what a surprise to come back to from holiday. Surprised I’m one of the 50, but am very grateful to be among them.
This is a very nice change, automation was definitely the best way forwards for this much needed improvement in the promotion from “New Member” to “Member”.
I definitely think this is a great change, before it sort of seemed like a popularity contest where you had to get noticed, and it wasn’t as easy to understand how to become a Member. Now I think it’s a better system and it promotes you to member based off what you should actually get promoted for.
Does this mean I’ll finally get taken off New Member rank, even though I signed up years ago
@JSON_String As mentioned earlier somewhere, the moderators can deal with flagged posts super quickly and bans and strikes aren’t too common (as far as I know). Part of the LTC’s job here is improving how the community functions. The LTCs and DevRel members who spent the time making this decision were doing their job, not neglecting it.
@pydlv If you aren’t active, probably not. Some of the factors involved include your activity and stats. Being a member for years but never coming on won’t promote you. I see that you haven’t posted for over a year. Continue working hard and you certainly will be promoted, however. Good luck!
Well one reasons I haven’t posted much is that ‘new members’ aren’t allowed to post in the channels/topics interesting to me. Maybe it’s changed since then, but I remember one the only boards I could reply to being the ones for development support/scripting help. However, my interest in the devforum has never been in providing development support. I would much rather discuss product design and provide platform feedback.
I absolutely agree with this new change in the developer forum process, ROBLOX is growing quickly and so is its developer community. 
Glad to see more automation coming in, love the change!
Interesting. Happy to see the developer community is growing, and that an efficient system is in place to assist in the ever-growing community!!
I love this process so much better. I recently got promoted to member and it’s amazing :D. A lot faster than the old process in my opinion. 
Great change, automation will help accept more members in to get more varsity of experienced developers. Thanks for this change!
Efficiency too! More like an evolution from the old process, I can only see this as a step forward.
Great to see some new updates to the forum that will benefit tons of developers who want to branch out and meet others!
According to what I was told, old criteria for promotion from the old process was all contribution and activity. You had to engage enough and be active on the forums. Sometimes you would not get noticed but many people can actually think of it as a “popularity contest”, I guess, considering you had to be noticed for the criteria in hopes of promotion. Oh, and good with moderation, as it can hold you back from being a full member. So with these being the old criteria, it is was extremely hard being promoted in the past and not all contributors could be promoted, only those noticed a lot. With that said, no doubt this is the best change to a process of DevForum promotion to being a full member. I guess we can see why a lot of people support this change entirely. A part of it wanting veterans standing out more, but hey, they eventually will.
To at to that, before the automated system, wishing people who might become LTCs a happy forum-versary/birthday would probably have a lot more of an effect on your promotion.
I think there’s some serious misinterpretation going on here about how this worked. Any suggested promotion would be discussed and vetted for forum behavior by the entire group so it’s absolutely not the case that sending any number of messages to top contributors would have resulted in having a higher chance of being promoted. It’s more likely they’d just think you were annoying if you did that too often. People are not so petty that a simple message would make them forget about checking for proper forum etiquette and activity.
This new process was put into place for the throughput benefits – we did not have any problems with fairness of promotion to my knowledge, only workload.
TLDR; the idea of favoritism based on how much you messaged/flattered certain LTC/TC contributing to a promotion is a myth.
I really like this change!
The old process was a bit confusing for me, but now my hopes increased greatly 
I feel if that were a thing, this forum site would have been messed up. I feel if that were how any sort of member had a possible promotion, that would be highly unethical. I hope that was never ever the case of someone being promoted over wishing an anniversary or birthday. I am sure they would say “Thank you.” but wishing someone an anniversary or birthday is not yet close to being promoted, it is nice to wish someone that, but it is something I consider personal and has nothing to do with a community forum. Therefore, not worthy of a promotion over a single message. But interesting topic, @SuperSmartyPants600. Love topics like these.
Please tell me that was never the case.
If you read the reply two above yours from Buildthomas you would know it was never the case. That’s also what your common sense would hopefully tell you.
I believe this is a much needed change. Hopefully, achieving “Member” status will take a lot less longer than how it was before 