Board Thread:Community Voting/@comment-26080047-20170303033658/@comment-4964341-20170303100520

TheShadowAssassin wrote: Keplers wrote: The crux of your argument is for recording "achievement" as if that's a big deal. I think what BCGirl said sums it up — we are here to record facts, not twist them because we dislike them. The rank tab says "Alien" and they are Alien. That's why Benboy et al. still have their ridiculous ranks despite it being a publicly-known fact that they cheated. Yes, but the ranks existed to reflect the accomplishments of the user depending on what they accomplished with their time on the MBs. For example, in this case, the Alien rank is a not an accurate reflection of someone who only accomplished being on the boards for 3 weeks, posting several hundred times, and receiving a few thousand likes. It is an accurate reflection of someone who accomplished being on the boards for several years, posting tens of thousands of times, and receiving hundreds of thousands of likes, and they should be attributed with the rank. If we simply leave everyone at "Alien", it completely defeats the purpose of having a rank in the first place, and will no longer have any relevance to the history of a user.

And for the record, I do not condone cheating in any form, and believe that fair action should be taken to rectify the issue with Benboy's rank and the ranks of others who cheated. But that's an entire other topic to discuss, because we're not talking about cheaters; we're talking about people who actually achieved their rank. Again, though: at the time of the MBs' closure, they held the rank. Nobody could feasibly hold the rank given most estimates; it would require as much time of activity as the MBs had existed, hundreds of thousands of posts, etc. We cannot simply ignore that the rank was given to all users because we dislike it on principle. I still support the idea of including the fact that the user held a different rank previously.