badges

The badges are a throwback to earlier days of the VM forum when the forum had a greater number of repeat visitors/contributors.

Best to just try to ignore them!

If trivia like badges are an annoyance, an ISP service from VM is not for you ! 

Honestly, there are some forum contributors who think them valuable, a ‘badge’ of honour, so to speak.

To be fair a lot of forms have a similar setup - the idea is that is you view a post form someone with, oh whatever, ‘deity level’ badge, then you might conclude that their ramblings are more worth of belief than someone with a ‘peon level’ badge. Of course said ‘deity level’ person might well have gotten it by posting a lot of complete rubbish, but it seems that the criteria is ‘number of posts’, not whether or not are actually useful.

And as ‘Goslow’ rightly says above, just ignore them, they are completely irrelevant.