So "recognized" means you had to have published (as opposed to being well-known presumably?). Yeah, that certainly cuts down on helping newbies out. I'm glad I found this forum, and contrary to what the naysayers are saying on the Nex forum, this forum and its participants have helped me a very great deal.
As for the new forums (community hub or whatever they are calling it), it does take time to adjust to such a different looking forum but hopefully Beth will figure it out, improve and so forth to make it useful. I am a mod on what used to be a decently popular reefkeeping forum. The forums pretty much has become non-existent once they moved over to a new forum (hub); had multiple kinks, spam, errors, that no one seemed able to fix and basically drove out most of the community and scared the newcomers off.