I support Omni posts counting, but realize it's not the end of the world if they don't. EOW only occurs if FT ceases to exist at all
This topic has come up before, & at dif times Omni posts have counted/not counted, but the fact that it has come up & people do feel strongly about it & being a rep of TB & feeling it deserved further consideration, I decided to make the proposal.
In doing some homework (aka, reading the current discussion thread as well as going back & reading public & private TB discussion threads re: the topic from a few years ago), I came across the following by
wr_schwab, which made me think more favorably re: Omni posts counting/he made good points (as have others).
"I agree with the motion to include OMNI posts in post counts.
Well it comes down to a couple of reasons.
There has been arguments in past debates, and I am sure they will occur again, that people use the post count as a measure of how much experience they have on a given topic.
I have been a member of too many different forums to count on a wide variety of topics since I first logged onto the Internet many years ago. It has been my experience, is that if you spend any time at all on any forum you quickly learn who are the knowledgable people on that topic, and which ones are full of themselves, regardless of how many posts they actually have.
FlyerTalk is a very diverse community, full of a wide array of people each of which have different opinions and positions on just about everything. We have some people who post a lot on the USAir forum, others on the Delta forum, others on the CommunityBuzz, and believe it or not we even have people who post alot on OMNI
Part of being a community is to help ensure that there is a thread that binds us all together. For many of this, it is the love of travel. Others, it might be a good debate on the merits or faults of the TSA or it might involve the "Lost" 2008 season and the affect of the writer's strike will have on it.
The post count helps unify the community as a whole because it provides a record of how active you have been in the community. It means nothing else, well it might mean that you have a lot of time to spare if it is really high, but it doesn't mean anything truely important. A community that the only thing that I am reasonably certain about its members is our collective obsession about counting miles and points.
Like it or not, OMNI is part of the FT Community. It is like the bar in some back alley on the wrong side of the tracks. Everyone knows it is there, and some people would bulldoze the entire area to get rid of it if they could. Since it is part of the FT Community, why should someone's contribution there not count towards the total?
Well, it has been said that OMNI doesn't advance FT primary mission. Well, maybe that is true, but at the same time you can say that about Only Randy Petersen, Technical Issues, & Suggestions. Their primary focus is not travel related. Their primary focus is something else, in this case helping to improve FT, yet we count those posts because we recognize that there is a benefit to having them and to recognize a member's participation in those areas.
OMNI serves a purpose as well, it is the escape valve for everything else. In the time I have been a member of FT, I have met a number of different people at FT. As much as I hate to admit it, neither them or I can talk about travel 100% of the time. Does that mean I should go somewhere else to talk about the new Star Trek movie?
No, I take the conversation to OMNI where I can talk about it with the people I have meet in the travel forums on FT, so you can see it does serve a purpose and we should continue to recognize their participation in the community.
There is what is known as OMNI Waste of Time games. You know the ones, count down from 100,000, Who Will Be The Next FlyerTalk Member To Post? An OMNI Game...the ones that can be downright annoying at times, but incredibly useful when you are sitting in an airport trying to kill some time. Again, they serve a purpose. Should these posts counts?
I look at these posts as being the OMNI equivalent of the The 6969 post club! and the various Happy Birthday threads in CommunityBuzz. Are they annoying? I think both these type of threads in CommunityBuzz and in OMNI are annoying at times. Do I think that should count towards the post total? I think it would be hypocritical of me to suggest otherwise. Just because I don't like a certain aspect of it, doesn't mean we should through the baby out with the bathwater."
Cheers.