I apologize both for being probably unnecessarily anal and for taking CookingWithGas’s name in vain, but his user number is 16475 and join date is March 1999. The user number should be in the hundreds. The 16000 level wasn’t reached until about summer 2001. Why so high?
I’m guessing since I’m not privy to the details, but most likely it represents a merged account or some other admin level manipulation.
Where does one find this user number you talk about?
If you hover over your user name and look at the bottom of the page, your’s is 5569.
Thanks. It all makes sense.
5+5+6+9 = 25
2+5 = 7
7 is the perfect number.
Merged account.
Does merged account mean “sock”?
How did you notice all that?
Sometimes people forget they even had an account 16 years ago, make a new one, then find out that makes them an accidental sock. Still not allowed, but the mods are generally cool with giving people the benefit of the doubt, I think.
“Sock” usually implies intention to post as a separate identity to mislead. There have been numerous incidents where people started new accounts, either because they forgot they had an account, or didn’t have access to their prior email, or whatever. Subsequently, they came clean, and were able to get the matter resolved without incident.
However, being in such a state and the admin finding it is grounds for banning, unless you can convince them it was unintentional/not for causing trouble.
They contacted me, told me I had another open account, and asked if I wanted to merge them. Very nice about it.
I found his user number as explained above. His join date is shown in his post (the precise date is shown in his user profile). In my anal way (you can blame Zeldar!), I have always been interested in early user numbers, so I recognized that his was too high for his date.
If you look at the ‘Charter Members: Who and how many are left?’ thread, you can see many early joiners’ numbers. Fascinating, isn’t it? 