What do the words "Registered User" under someone's user name signify?

I saw it today and don't recall having noticed it with anyone else.

Could you provide a link to the thread in which you saw it or the specific profile? Thanks ...

I wish I could but I can't remember what thread it was -- or what the user name is. As far as I recall, however, there was no indication that the user is not currently allowed to post.

This one......?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...-result-5.html (post #181)

Yes, thank you!

This question was addressed twice before, with one of the threads in the Only Randy Petersen forum:

• What does "registered user" mean?
• Registered User

Of course, Dovster, you and I did not help matters any with regard to our mis-direction of the first thread...

I had forgotten about that first thread -- but you are right, you and I managed to destroy it completely without getting an answer.

Randy did give a reply in the second thread (which I had never seen before), but I suspect that his guess was wrong:

As there are quite a few newbies without "Registered User" under their names, it appears that the tech people should have told Randy that he struck out. Of course, as they were working for him in those days that might not have been the most political move they could make.

They gave no answer at all, leaving this perplexing question unanswered.

(Should it ever be resolved, I will come up with an even more difficult one concerning how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.)

...and then there is the title of At Large, but that topic is probably for a different thread...

I know what "At Large" means and, as you linked it to a specific person, I believe it would be a TOS violation to discuss it. The same does not appear to be true for "Registered User".

Questions? I've got answers!

This actually took some digging so bear with me.

In the default of vBulletin, there is a group that is defined as "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation". The default of this usergroup is set to "Registered User".

So, here's what likely happened:

1. User joins FlyerTalk. User is placed into "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" usergroup and is given the "Registered User" title.
2. User confirms email and is automatically promoted to "Registered" usergroup, thus removing the "Registered User" title as they are no longer a member of the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" usergroup
3. User contributes some posts
4. User forgets password and uses the "Lost Password" feature to request a new one. When he/she does this, he/she is placed back into the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" usergroup and is reassigned the "Registered User" title. As such this title would now appear under the user's name on his/her posts. Once the user reconfirms the new password, and is put back into the "Registered" usergroup, the title would go away again.

But, that doesn't explain the issue with the member mentioned in post #4.

In this case, and a few others like this member, we think what might have happened is that, after requesting their new password, they wrote us an email saying they hadn't yet received it. In cases like this, we usually assign them a temporary password and move them to the Registered usergroup manually. We probably did this and neglected to update their User Title, which would have occurred automatically had they gone through the normal process. And voila, they are left with the weird "Registered User" title.

Looks like there were only seven such cases, and all have now been manually corrected (Thank you for keeping us on the top of things). We're going to keep an eye on this to see if any new ones pop up unexpectedly and we still aren't quite sure if this will completely resolve the issue.

We have removed the "Registered User" title from the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" usergroup. There are currently over 11K users in this group with zero posts who have the title, but should they register the title will be removed (and if they ask us to help them, we'll be careful to remove the title manually).

And now you know ... the rest of the story.

Truly, thanks for the question and it was a nice challenge for us to finally figure it out.

Thanks, Randy!

Now, about that matter of angels on the head of a pin...