Lottery Post Journal

I made some significant changes tonight that I've been working on for about a week.

• Added a Permalink to every forum post in a topic, so people can link directly to a post. The permalink can be obtained by clicking the small icon to the left of the post date/time.  (Definition of Permalink.)
• Added completely new member rankings system, based upon consistency of posting to the forums.  (Blog post describing the new ratings system.)  Long-time participation combined with consistent daily pariticpation yields the highest rankings.
• Rankings are re-evaluated by the Lottery Post system automatically every night, and every member who was promoted during the night will receive a PM to let them know.
• Removed 1-5 star display that used to show the member level, and replaced with graphic badges showing the member level.

I designed the new membership badges myself.  I'm not really an artist-type, so they went through several iterations and different ideas before I came up with that design.  The "glossyness" of the badges was an idea I came up with after seeing some of the new Windows Vista UI.  Every time I need to come up with new graphics, I'll probably add them with Vista's new look & feel in mind.

I used Adobe Photoshop to create the images, for those who care about that kind of stuff.

I hope everyone enjoys the new changes, and gets value out of rankings that are a huge improvement over raw post count.  It won't be perfect, but I really like it.