I don't pay any attention to the member 'classification', just the number of posts and if it is few, then try to take that into consideration as to how much the poster may be familiar with the forum.
I would like to see them drop the "elite' , star, gold, brown, yellow, silver classification and just list the number of posts (and stop at 500+). But I don't make those decisions, and don't want to change a well-run forum. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif