I'd like to chime in here as one of the winners of the AMS tickets. Before the AMS thread I had around 360 posts, all of which, I consider, to be either substantive or questions that I posed to the FT community. I posted around 3,600 times in the AMS thread. Guess what? I figured it was going to be a random number, and there's not many sweepstakes in the world where you can actually increase your chances of winning to over 5%, which is what my post count on that thread provided.

I could care less about "Evangelist" status. I could care less about the 4,000+ number sitting next to my name now. I just wanted to win some free tickets. If it makes other people feel somehow inferior to me, or perhaps threatened by my post count (for whatever reason), cool. Delete my posts. I don't care. I don't earn more money at my job because of my post count. I don't receive any tangible or intangible benefit from my post count. If you wanna drop me back down to around 370 (which is where I am if you subtract my AMS thread posts), I won't bat an eye.

But...keep in mind, some of those who are the most devoted to FT are those who posted in that thread. Who else would waste ~15 hours of their life typing in repetitive nonsense just to win a free ticket? Those are the people who have traveled a heck of a lot more for less money because of FT. We love FT enough to waste every free hour we had to post BS in that thread.

I, for one, am tremendously happy that I won the tickets, and have gotten several friends and seatmates to check out FT because of it. And guess what? None of them is going to take a look at my post count and stress about it. Why does it matter? Oh yea, it doesn't. If you want to judge my "worth" to FT, check out my $484 flight to SYD or perhaps my *A RTW spreadsheet (which is located in my first ever thread started on FT). The little number next to my name means little, and if you have "post envy", I can't help ya. Just keep posting and learning, and please, please stop stressing.

Viva la FT,

Chris