Also funny that they only caved because “reading” was the only missing skill from the CEFR, yet the book clubs are making up the large majority of the category. 
Regular is one of the 4 trust levels of the forum. New users are “basic”, you and most forum goers are “member”, people who meet some requirements supposed to show involvement in the community (in the past 100 days, visited 50 days, read 20000 posts
, visited 400 threads, got and gave a bunch of likes…) are “regulars”, and special users (mostly moderators) are “leaders”.
Being a regular has a bunch of nice perks: ability to rename and move threads, ability to turn one’s own thread into wiki, additional likes per day, access to a special area on the forum,…
Renaming and wiki are very useful for book club activities, so I just force myself to go through a bunch of posts to meet the requirements whenever I need to use them.
As for checking, @kumirei has made a script that keep track of those requirements from the moment you installed it. (So it takes 100 days to get accurate stats). I’m only meeting 63% of the reading requirement so far (thankfully I have a bunch more from before the moment I installed the script, but I guess I may lose my status soon…)