Newer Members - Don't Be Fooled By Member Titles Under Our Avatars

Originally Posted by BIG Mike

After all the time we've been using the new forum, I just really noticed this (they don't call me, "Master of the Obvious" for nothing!) as a potential issue for newer members not used to the Warrior Forum.

You may know that we can assign ourselve Custom User Titles - for example, mine is Drunken Greek. These are just there for fun mostly, and are meaningless in most cases, except to the member creating it.

In reading a thread tonight I happened to notice this one:


There are two things about this that are misleading - the first is that no one has "Officially" assigned the title "Trusted Warrior" to this member - he or she made it up.

Now, this person may well be perfectly trustworthy, and I'm not here to sully his or her good name. However, I can see how a newer member might read too much into that, especially for a WSO. Just keep in mind, the Warrior Forum did not assign that title.

The second thing is the 5 stars in avatar - in the Snitz version of the WF (the pervious forum), you "Earned" stars as your post count got higher and higher. You also earned a title to go along with those five stars - "Senior Warrior".

I mention that because I've seen quite a few Custom User Titles with Senior Warrior in them, along with a number of other variations that are not in fact "Official" titles. And I'm not all that sure that these folks would have been Senior Warriors if we were still using the Snitz forum.

There is one other thing I noticed when I was reading a different thread that I guess you should also look out for - I saw a WSO with a title of "WSO Of The Day Award" and to my knowledge, there is no such award.

In fact, unless Allen has personally gone into a WSO and given a recommendation for it, you should know that the Warrior Forum does not endorse WSO's or give them awards of any kind.

These and other titles, like, "Best Selling WSO Ever" or "Most Commented WSO Ever" are made up by the seller. There is no way to know for certain which WSO was the best selling, and if you see claims about the most commented WSO's, go look at it and you'll see fully half the comments were made by the seller.

Now, obviously folks do these things for credibility (Social Proof), but you must take them with a grain of salt. Just like high post counts, thanks given and times thanked, etc., none of them are absolutely clear indicators of anyone's credibility or success.

As always, the best way to determine someone's credibility is to look at their past history, the posts they've made, and ask around if need be.

Don't assume what you see on the surface is entirely accurate - just saying...

P.S. - Not sure if it can be done, but maybe the Word Warrior could be added to an exclude list for Custom User Titles.