Alright so this question is probably going to sound a little silly:
What do the titles under your post count titles mean? Is Troll Slayer for moderators, and Thor for admins? What's a Skald, or a Slayer of Silence?
- The post count titles for regular members are just SSSS-ified versions of SMF's Newbie, Member, Senior Member, etc. post-based titles. What they aimed for when they thought up them was stripping the rank-iness feel from it by these new names AND making them sound cool, of course.
- Skald is kinda a lowrank moderator status. They can do organizing related stuff but not the peacekeeping part.
- Troll Slayer is our fancy name for Global Moderator, Thor is admin.
- This whole wonderful mess is basically powered by SMF's usergroups feature. User groups can be various types:
- the ones you get into by post count,
- the type that you have to get put into by a moderator / admin,
- there are also types that you can only get in by requesting invitation,
- and there are ones you can just join with a click.
(we don't have groups of the latter two currently) - The main purpose of user groups is managing permissions. For example, you don't have to give forum magic powers to every moderator individually, you can set those permissions for the moderator usergroup and everyone in that group gets forum magic powers then. Or another example, we could have a separate usergroup made for giving image removing rights in the Reaction image hoard.
- The little boxes don't follow some very strict logic, but they can be set individually for every usergroup. For example we could make Scouts have 4 boxes and Citizens just one, or make Airport Rulers have 5 little airplanes instead of boxes... with our current settings, yellow boxes are regular members, green boxes are Skalds, blue ones are Moderators and red ones are the Admins.
Aaaand sorry for rambling. I hope I helped.
Thanks for the great explanation, Eriaror. (Why haven't we promoted *you* yet? ???)
Trinka, there's no such thing as a silly question. Never hesitate to ask!
Here's some background:
I was calling myself "Forum-Skald" long before I got any actual powers, just because I was taking it upon myself to do skaldish things -- e.g. ferry interesting content over from Disqus, create new threads, organize existing content, and explain our content policies to others, as well as writing poems and little scenarios myself. (Historically, a "skald" in the Viking culture filled the role of chronicler, historian, reporter, poet, secretary, publicist, county clerk, and more; the title has been revived in the Known World, as we see in Torbjörn.)
Initially, Eich gave me the functional title of Skald when he endowed me with a custom subset of Moderator powers, specifically to handle content. When he bumped Kjeks and me up to full Moderator powers, the title automatically changed to Troll Slayer.
Hushpiper has the function of Admin but the custom title of Slayer of Silence because she led the effort to diagnose and fix a serious problem we were having around Christmas last year: an overactive censorship filter that was eating people's posts for no apparent reason.
Eich has the custom title of Thor because he founded the Forum and is our lead Admin. All hail.