I would prefer it in a different way:

Use green names for newbies,
yellow names for regulars,
red named for moderators.

And put the old ranks back online, but replace "Newbie" with something else like "friend". I can imagine that a lot of people hate being called Newbie, me included.

I could live without the ranks if we still had the post counts in the user profiles (and I really don't expect people to start stupid "What's your postcount?" threads. After all, those stats are available in the user profiles for the original poster), also I would like some useful information in the place that was occupied by the rank. I liked the "home country" idea, but I noticed that _very_ few people on the BBS filled their profiles to a usuable level, let alone filling it completely.

cu,
sven

cu,
sven.