I looked around but could not find a FAQ on this. Each poster on the board has a status listed. “Charter Member” is obvious. “Guest” seems odd since many of those have been here for years and are hardly guests. I would have thought that “Regular Member” or something was more accurate.
One forum I belong to ranks the posters by their number of posts, you advance from aluminum to steel to stainless steel, then titanium, etc (It’s a metalworking group).
But so be it, far from me to ruffle such a great forum. But I thought I read one post where something else was written there. Did I imagine that?
Guest is a poster, like yourself, that registered (for free) and posts.
Member is a poster that pays $15 (?) a year and gets a small handful of perks.
Charter Member are the elite few of of that have been paying members since very early on.
Also, (paying) Members can pay a few additional dollars to get something written under the word Member/Charter Member.
Basically, it just has to do with whether or not you’re kicking a few bucks over to the board each year or not, but that’s it. Nothing to do with how many posts, quality of posts or anything else. Most people don’t even really look at it, much less judge your posts by it.
Thanks, Joey. I was just returning to amend my post, since I looked again and did find it mentioned in the FAQ under “Registration Agreement”. Guess I didn’t read that entry.
There are quite a few FAQs/Stickies, it can take quite a while to comb through them all. I thought about trying to find it myself for you (I know it’s in there somewhere), but figured it would be faster to just type it out.
Charter members pay half of the yearly fee, since they are grandfathered with that rate reduction always available as long as their status does not lapse.
I actually began to a write a medium-length post describing the different eras of the SDMB, with the rise of pay-to-post et al. But then I realized I can no longer remember the dates and just deleted the whole thing.
This thread guilted me into renewing my Membership.
Am I crazy, or was there a period of time where it was pay only? I seem to remember people bitching that the quality of the boards would go down if we allowed nonpayers to post.
Yeah, when I joined ten years ago, it was pay to post. New members could join free for a 30 day trial period, but once the 30 days were up, you had to subscribe to keep posting, although guests could still read the forums for free.
Really? I don’t remember that period at all. Although it might have been during one of my periodic withdrawals when I don’t visit the board for months.
I think message boards are just not cutting edge any more. There’s more social media options. I remember there was a drop when LiveJournal came out, and Facebook, and so on.
But we 99ers will still be posting from the nursing homes: “This is Northern Piper’s nursing attendant posting on behalf of Northern Piper. He wants to remind everyone that we used to wear onions on our belts, as was the fashion at the time…”
And I remember people asking in ATMB for people to pay for their subscriptions, and I remember people doing it, and I remember people offering to pay for the subscriptions of new members they found promising.
