This might be helpful:
I’m trying to remember off the top of my head what some of the specifics are for this forum, 'cause Discourse (the platform used for the forum) can be customized. I think the stuff here was like 50 days visited and 20k posts read. Whatever it is, you have to be trust level 3. An easy way to check where you’re at is to visit the tool mentioned in this thread:
Edit:
I had more than 15k, so I totally understand. I think it has to do with the fact that this is based on an entirely different forum platform than the old forums, and so migrating all of that would’ve taken more time and resources than they were willing to throw at it. The only people I know of that were gifted fancy features out of the gate (other than Blues) were the old MVPs, and IIRC, they were each manually adjusted to a special category in order to grant them the privileges. Someone like WyomingMist would have to confirm that for sure, though.