Where all my Trekkies at?

I'm a huge Star Trek fan, so I decided to have a little fun and give everyone a rank just like in Starfleet. Your rank is based on a proprietary formula that I derived. It's based on a number of factors including how long you've been a student, how many classes you've taken, how much you help out in the Forums (which is why Alex is our only 4-Star Admiral), your memberships, and a few other "secret sauce" recipe items.

The most heavily weighted factor is how many courses you've taken. This will allow others to see your accomplishments and know how valued you are to The Fleet. I'm going to eventually add perks for some of the ranks, like a Captain's Lounge and some other ideas I have floating around in my head. Of course I welcome your feedback. I'm going to eventually have promotions like "you just made Lieutenant! Here's a gift certificate..." kind of stuff. Stay tuned.

I started this business in 2002. Since then I've had over 40,000 customers. I tried to break up The Fleet so we had a proportionate number of officers at each rank based on the factors above. So as of today, this is the Fleet breakdown. We've got 1 Fleet Admiral (that's me), 1 Admiral (Alex), no Vice Admirals (gives everyone something to strive for), a total of 33 Rear Admirals, 91 Captains, 199 Commanders, and various other ranks as shown on the chart to the left. 

I'm having to slowly reload all of the active customer accounts to the web site from my office Access database, so your ranks will slowly start to show up between now and Monday. Don't panic if you think you should be a Lieutenant and you're only a Crewman. Everyone will show up as a Crewman until they get their real rank. You can force your account to update faster here.

Your rank will appear on all of your Forum posts as a series of pips, just like in Star Trek. Hover over it to see your rank. Click on it for the full details, or visit the Badges page for more. I've also added it to your My Account page.

I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I do. Your feedback is always welcome.