Ub3r

Overview

The Hack Forums Ub3r upgrade is the second and final upgrade which almost any member can do on their account, with the exceptions of the Mentor, Staff and Administrator positions. The Ub3r upgrade is now an automated process which can be started by any member on the condition that their account is over 60 days old. This upgrade was added to the site on the 21st of December 2009 and has remained ever since.

Benefits of Upgrading

The benefits of upgrading to the Ub3r status are as follows:

• All L33t features.
• You are able to junk one of your threads every 24 hours.
• You are able to give out reputation from +3 to -3.
• You are able to have a maximum of 2500 private messages.
• Automatic Sapphire of Ub3r award.
• Can view the banned member page, the 24h negative-reputation log page, the amount of posts a member has per section, the reputations given per member, the warnings (and reason) a member currently has and the current stickes around the forum.
• Special username colour.
• Special ‘User Star’ colour.
• Able to view members who are appearing offline.
• Can open and close their own threads.
• Special Userbar.
• Can nominate members for Member Of The Month.
• Special Ub3r-Only sections.
• Can track Private Messages to see if they have been opened.

Upgrading process

Once a member feels that they qualify for the Ub3r group, they are to go here and submit the name of the user to upgrade. From there it will display whether they are eligible or not. If they are not, the user must wait another 60 days before applying again, or they will be denied again. If a member is too low-quality, they may be permanently denied.

If a member is accepted, they are provided a link to upgrade, to which they are to pay $22.99 USD (Plus any transaction fees) for the upgrade. They are to wait up to 48 hours to be upgraded, and if that time passes and they have not been upgraded, they are to PM Omniscient with their Transaction ID. Some countries however do not accept Paypal as a method of purchasing this upgrade, so other methods must be found.

There are currently 3 different options of the application:

• Accepted
• Denied
• Permanently Denied

Conditions of Upgrading

• Not to abuse the Reputation feature.
• Not to leak the upgrade link.
• A ub3r upgrade can only be gifted to another user by another Ub3r.
• You are not allowed to refund/chargeback the payment, or your account will be closed.
• You must use real information.

Removal of Ub3r

When some members have done something which the administration team does not feel represents the Ub3r group in a positive manner, they may remove the user from the Ub3r group, returning them to the L33t group. When this happens they are stripped of the latter abilities (including userbar & name colour) and only have the abilities of a L33t member. Some members have been allowed to upgrade to Ub3r again, and some have not.

If a member is demoted to L33t and they have over the 1500 Private Messages allocated with the L33t upgrade, they are unable to accept any more PM's until their box is cleared.