In my opinion, this is a good idea to avoid clutter in this forum. There are thousands of threads already and some have redundant topics.
For one thing, there's already
a thread in Meta for congratulating members who've recently ranked up.
Second, people who want to toot their own horn after getting to their next rank are probably not going to seek out this thread to do it in, especially since OP made it self-moderated for some bizarre reason.
And third, I'm of the opinion that members don't need to be congratulating themselves on ranking up, as those threads seem to be (to my jaded eyes) attempts to get even more merits.
Therefore, I think OP ought to just lock this thread and forget about it. I'm not sure what his motivation was in creating it (probably to earn merits), but it's a bad idea overall.
Edit:
Yeah, of course I didn't read your post before writing mine--bad habit, but I'm glad someone was thinking the same thing I was.