Changes to the Stormrage Guild system

[Treesh]

After giving this some thought, I think the real issue here isn't guild rankings -- it's the issue of recruitment.  As we adventure, we all run into good worthy players whom we feel could be assets to our community.  The question is how do we go about that recruitment process?  My feeling is that the individual "guilds" on the servers are not the correct way to recruit new people.  Instead, new people should be referred to the website and forums, and the "guilds" should only be reserved for those players who have been shown to be members in good standing on the forums.  In other words, a recruitment conversation could look like this:

"Lurkers?  What's that?"

"Oh!  It's a group of us who read the strategy website, The Lurker Lounge.  You should check it out.  http://www.lurkerlounge.com/ "

"Is that a guild?"

"Not really.  It's a website for discussing WoW strategy and is open for everyone.  Some of us decided to make an WoW guild so that we could find each other in-game.  You should check out the site.  It's great!"

"Ah, ok. Cool."
On the other hand, a recruitment conversation should never look like this:

"Lurkers?  What's that?"

"Oh, it's a cool guild.  Want to join?"
To that end, back to the discussion of rankings, I guess the one ranking I don't see a need for is Lounge Lizard.  Basically, if there's a person who we don't know well enough to trust with Lurkers powers, then I'd rather not have that person be in the guild in the first place.  The various Lurker Lounge guilds should only be made up of people whom we know well and trust.
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I wasn't actually discussing us recruiting other people. I was asking about if someone is great and would like to join us and that player asks us to invite him (or her). Now, of course, everyone asking to join isn't going to be invited to join because that's just asking for trouble, but if someone seems to be a genuinely good fit, am I supposed to tell him, "Nope. You have to go visit the site first and become a known member there first before we'll even consider you." I've never had anyone ask "Lurkers? What's that?" or even anything remotely close to that because in game it shows up as a guild. It shows up as a guild tag under the name so the people in game will assume it's a guild. It still comes off as rude and rather silly telling someone as nicely as possible that they can't join because they haven't visited the site yet, and still claim that we aren't an actual guild. And your way still seems cliquish to me. "You're a good person, but you have to endure our trials on the boards before you can become one of us."