Yeah I mean those numbers are kind of “built in” we can change them to fit our community better. But frankly it hasn’t been an issue… I don’t think most users care that much.
I think the point is the more active and wide you participate the higher the ranking. a V8 user may not visit E10 topics. But the V8 topics are much lower so even if they see everything in V8 category in the “grand” total of the site they are not that active… IDK
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yeah, you just can’t win no matter what you do…
I see valid points all over the place. However TL3 status is for all intensive purposes moderator level privileges and with that comes a lot of responsibility, and the ability to do more than enough damages. We don’t need that achieved by anyone gaming the system, and therefore isn’t given out lightly. The prize at the end of TL3 is not the ability to PM, nor should it become a play the numbers game to get there. The nature of the public community is to share and post and converse publicly. Each and everyone of us can use email, and other means to chat privately with other community members if you really need to, and ‘need’ in my opinion is a stretch or subjective at the very least. We’ll review the levels however but having the ability to PM isn’t what this is forum founded on or should be a focus.
How can you share that without PM?
This may not be possible, but can there be a feature for contact sharing that isn’t PM? Maybe like a dating site where both parties have to agree before e-mail are exchanged?
I agree with this!
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I never subscribed to being adverse (low level paranoia?) to sharing my email in the pursuit of business, with peers, especially inside a community of professionals of high quality and standards such as the ones that exist in here. I can demonstrate techniques to type out your email if you’re not familiar with them that will prevent automated bots from collecting and spamming you if you are interested 
please do. You can email them to me at
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MyEmailAddress.txt.minilock.txt (964 Bytes)
If you kids want to play with some easy crypto…in Chrome, download the MiniLock.io extension. Follow the directions to create a MiniLock.io key. This is mine:
6FUJziUbkQZWbFUqfLDu57jqYmcr9Lt3sEc6FpKToi9n6
To send a file to me and only me, drop a file (maybe it contains an email address…) on the app and insert my MiniLock ID (can send to more than one MiniLock ID) and take the resulting file and upload it. I entered my email address in a text file and sent it to a single MiniLock ID. It’s encrypted and only be decrypted by the user’s MiniLock ID and pass phrase. Just download the file (remove the ‘.txt’ at the end since .minilock isn’t a valid extension right now here in the group) and drop it on the app. Open it up and you’ve exchanged email addresses.
However, Rob’s point is valid. If conversations break out offline, you lose the real value of the group and all of that knowledge is locked up.
Mark W.
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Well, I am definitely biased, as I am a new user to the forum, and want to PM a particular forum member. So my vote is to have the PM abilities open, and deal with spam as needed.
My feeling on obfuscation is that if I can figure it out, so can a bot (as per this: Surprise: There’s really no need to conceal your email address from spammers). A better solution? Abstinence. Just don’t post your e-mail address in public forums.
As to valuable content going off-line, the forum can’t control it, so don’t worry about it. People wouldn’t be here if they didn’t see the value of the forum. And part of that is making one-on-one contact with other forum members.
My two cents…
You can pretty quickly get to the right level to send PM if you engage in the forum.
Otherwise reach out to that person off line.
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