New users... firstly, welcome to PGD. To try and minimise the workload for administrators and moderators, we use a scheme of automated promotions. You should make your first post in the designated thread in this forum, it will then be approved (or queried, further verified) by a moderator or administrator. At this point you should be automatically promoted by the system.

Or so we thought...

Some of you may have noticed that promotions seem to take quite a time and I've been investigating this for a while trying all sorts of things, so here's the low down and instructions on how to ensure this works nice and smoothly.

1. Signup
2. Verify your email address
3. Login
4. Make your first post
5. Wait for it to be moderated (and thus become visible to all users in the forum)
6. Spend a few minutes reading a few forums... modifying your profile... checking out a blog or two
7. Post some replies

Stage 6 is important... the system runs the scheduled task processor every time a page is requested. The user promotions task (which is what moves you from the moderated to the un-moderated groups) is set to run every minute... BUT... to minimise server load, it only processes users that have been active since it last ran. So, if you post your first post and then just wait, you'll be waiting ALONG time to get promoted.

So, please, if you are a new user, once your post has been moderated, visit the site a few times and fingers crossed, if my PHP interpretation skills are correct, you should find yourself promoted. Please report problems directly to me by email at athena at outer hyphen reaches dot com.