blindVigil said:
I became a Builder on 2020-09-13, you can see this in my User Feedback. Checking my post change history, at that time I had made about 600 edits since first making my account, and had made about 300 forum posts, the very first of which was in January of that year. So, it took me about 9 months from when I began seriously contributing, but it was 9 months of barely doing anything, and my early forum participation really didn't leave the best impressions. It was really just a handful of tag edits and forum comments a day, and suddenly I was Builder. The bulk of my contributions came after. Even now, I just fix a few tags here and there when I feel like it.
Tag clean-up is not competitive at all, because you can probably go to the front page right now and find several overlooked misstags. Pick any tag you like and just skim through it, and you'll find dozens upon dozens of posts that shouldn't be there. Every single tag is a mess, and there aren't enough people to clean it up, and too many people helping the mess grow.
9 months is still a pretty long time not to be able to see content I'd be able to right now if I could pay for a gold membership, content plenty of other sites allow regular users to view. It's quite upsetting that I should have to go to that extent, do that much work for such a long time just to be able to see content I'd have been able to see immediately had I made my account just a few months ago. I can try to make tons of contributions but I was just requesting the ability just to view the content in the meantime while the site works on fixing its payment processing system, and starting now I'll probably not become builder before that gets fixed anyway, so I might as well just give up and wait.
I understand you're trying to help, thanks for doing so and I apologize for the degree to which I'm being combative. Though I shouldn't be nearly this upset over an issue I only first encountered yesterday, I'm still finding it rather frustrating.