Some of you may have noticed the badges some members of the forums have. There are currently five active badges. Some of them are there to show you who staff are. Others are there to as a means of showing what areas certain people have contributed in. Currently these are the categories of badges:
Staff
Administrator These are the people with full control over the forums. In most cases you should contact the Global Moderators for any forum queries, but in the case of an emergency you can contact an administrator.
Global Moderators These are the moderators. They are tasked with enforcing the rules around here. If there isn't a specific rule written, their judgement on the issue is trusted. They are able to do what is necessary to keep these boards both on topic, and organized.
Developer This badge denotes someone with SVN access. These are the people who tend to have say on whether something actually gets into Rockbox. When one of these says something about what can or cannot be done on the player, or talks about how a particular piece of code works, odds are very good that they know very well what they're talking about. While no human is perfect, these are the most likely to know intimately how some specific area of Rockbox works.
Expert This badge is given to those who have taken the time to familiarize themselves well with the functioning of Rockbox, and try to be both helpful, mostly polite, and constructive to these forums. This means that they in most cases will try to point users to where their answers may be found, rather than directly answering a question, and then in the case of the user not understanding the documentation, help work through the process of figuring it out. The Experts are also expected to abide by the forum rules, including striving to use proper English in most cases. At times if a member has distinguished himself for being particularly helpful, and fits these requirements, they may receive the Expert badge, but it can just as easily be removed. DO NOT ASK IF YOU CAN BECOME AN EXPERT. Your actions are the only things that will be taken into consideration, and if you belong in this group, you will in time be noticed. Even if you aren't, it is expected that you're helping people for the sake of helping people, and that alone.
Please do not pester any of the staff randomly with PM'ed questions about Rockbox - that is what the forums are for!
Badges you may apply for
Artist These are the creators of Themes. People with this badge have created and submitted at least one original theme that works properly with SVN Rockbox or the current Rockbox release to the theme site at themes.rockbox.org.
Your theme must not contain copyright material by someone else. To apply, send me a PM with a link to your WPS. Assuming your theme appears to be an original creation (not a modification of someone else's, and not simply a design mimicking an existing player's look) you will be given this badge.
You also qualify for this badge if you've provided art resources used in the Rockbox manual or in SVN Rockbox. This would include, for example, the SVG images created for the manual or the bitmaps used in many of the plugin games.