Wow, people are really wondering about the Scythes, aren't they.
Well, allow me to shed some light on this:
There are two Administrators. Both admins will have five (5) of these:
There are Global Moderators (mods that can interact with the entire Forum). They will have five (5) of these:
Moderator are Mods that for whatever reason have chosen to moderate only one or more forums.
There are currently NONE of these. In the past, there have been people who have been in charge of only a few subforums (like Fan Stuff and Off Topic).
If there were such Mods still around, they would have five (5) of these:
A "RetroDungeonite" is a forum member who has been around since the EZForum days. Currently there are very few of these. These forum members may or may not be part of the "Inverted Castlevania Dungeon Forums", a 'sister' forum to this forum.
Those people would have this icon:
Note: There are other membergroups but they are super-duper-seeeeeecretive (or I'm completely lying and/or haven't found use for them yet).
Then there are the Post-Based Hunter Ranks. These are ranks automagically bestowed upon people by sticking around. IN other forums they would grant you perks and bonuses... but not here. Right here you're all pretty much equal, and the Ranks are only to let people know who's a newbie and who's an oldie. They are as follows:
Newbie (0 posts)
Hunter in Training (3 posts)
Vampire Hunter (100 posts))
Legendary Hunter (500 posts)
Master Hunter (1000 posts)
Some recently-added features this forum has (relatively speaking) are the "Awards", the "Respect", and "Thread Rating".
-----
"Respect" is really not the right term, though it is not an unwarranted term. Every time you write a quality post, a non-newbie Hunter may 'promote' the post. You can do this by clicking on the little Plus sign (+) at the top of a person's post. This adds +1 to a person's respect. You can write awesome posts or great replies to posts and you will see whether what you're saying is a quality thing to say, or whether you're saying something inflammatory (you can see minuses as well).
A person with low/negative Respect is likely a person who writes disagreeable things. Either that or someone's got a Vendetta against 'em and they're following them around minus-ing every post they make. Ix-nay on the ating-ray adly-bay, as ods-may can see who is being a oll-tray.
-----
"Thread Rating" lets people see when a thread is worth looking into. You do this by giving a full thread a Star Rating by selecting a number of Stars at the top of a thread. If you see a five-star thread, it's likely to be good, whereas a one-star thread may be bad (unrated threads are up for grabs).
Star Ratings are a staple of the OLD OLD OLD forums. They've been brought back only to harken back to that time and rating a thread badly or awesomely does not affect anything other than its rating display on the forum index (it would look like this
)
----
"The Awards"
The "Awards" system is purely honorary titles given to people. They can be something like Crisis's "Trollmeister" award, Freak's "Pervert" award, etc.
How do you get an award, you ask?
Start behaving in exemplary (or infamous) ways, and someone may shoot me a Private Message nominating you for an award.
Do you work on a lot of NES hacks? You may get a "Hack Master" award.
Do you listen to a lot of music You may get a "Music Fanatic" award. If you compose it, you may get "Chief Conductor".
Does it seem like you're always responding, to every thread, around the clock, every day? You may get a "Permanent Resident" award.
These are a few examples.
More info about the forum's "Awards"
here.
NOTE: I just stickied that thread up on Off Topic, so that it is easy to recall.