And that is reason why in every country there should be light collectors organisations in every country.No one can go to your home and say give me these bulbs without judge permission by the Constitution.

To be honest, they should at least rename those categories, especially the hero member one as it implies a higher "status" on the site. Personally I think they should make the categories more lighting themed anyway. Most forums like to theme those categories to the topic of their discussion.

Anther thing I've seen some sites do is to have a subforum where the rules are looser but your post count won't go up for discussions of a less serious nature. 

The current user categories names and the quantity of posts needed to reach those are the one that came for default from the forum software. Yeah, I agree that those categories should be renamed to something more lighting related.

Going up of category by the quality of the post is practically impossible, because how do you mark a post as "quality"? By the length of it? Too resource consuming software would slow down the site. If you have problems with users status and post counts, just delete them and all the problems are gone. And nobody will try to "grow up" or make competition because there's no "leaderboard".

As I understand it, the user status only goes up in just forum posts/reply’s, not comment on the gallery?

That's right, the gallery is run on different software that doesn't have a ranking system.

It would be better to rank users by the quantity of pictures uploaded, but there might not be a plugin that can do such thing and it would need to be coded by scratch, messing up something in the process.

Anywho, back to the original question, this reminds me of posts started on here when smart meters were first starting to be installed in the US, people were concerned if the energy companies were going to spy on how much electricity you were using, and cutting people off if they were deemed to be using too much!

I know their looking at the ‘green new deal’ in the US, but I doubt they would go as far as imprisonments for collecting discharge lighting??

That's right, the gallery is run on different software that doesn't have a ranking system.

The forum with its ranking system is SMF, the gallery is Coppermine. As far as I know (Patrick may be able to comment further) Coppermine doesn't have a ranking system.

In any case, any form of ranking should be on QUALITY not quantity. Anybody can upload hundreds of comments/posts full of drivel, and awful out of focus pictures.

So how do you decide what is rubbish and what isn't..? Answers on a postcard...

I wouldn't involve complex software to the site to decide what's good or not by two reasons. Such a software will waste an important part of the site resources, which can be used to improve the connection speed instead. And if we let an algorithm decide what's good or not we can end up like YouTube and its censor algorithm.

My suggestion is to rank users by quantity of pictures rather than quantity of posts.
But a problem comes, the competition can lead to filling up the servers faster than normal, and adding a new plugin to the site can lead to big problems and bugs that can last quite a while.

My other suggestion is that if you have too many problems of members competing for post quantity, just to keep the post count private and disabling the users ranking, and all problems will be gone.

If you want to keep the users ranking somehow I recommend to rank users by topics started.

I wouldn't blame the OP for doing too many posts, I feel like he's not flooding intentionally or competing, but he have questions and he goes directly to it. Also Wikipedia might not be a trustable knowledge source for him, and he prefers to do the questions here. I will suggest him that if he have another question, to ask it in the previous thread for avoid extra flood.

Topic locked. Nobody is coming to snatch your collections away!

Yeah and I just wan't to close this one off with this....

Governments won't waste money and resources to come and take away your lights. Look at automobiles for example. They are always being updated and such each year and needing to meet new regulations that the previous models didn't. No one is busting down Jay Leno's garage and raiding his classic rare car collection.

All that happens is the manufacturers will stop producing stuff after a while to move on to newer things... but thats it. So you can keep your old lights, cars, tv's or anything of the sort... But once it's used up, it's gone and thats that.