<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Indurain:
All I know is that trolling and personal attacks are driving me away from FT a little bit every day. I used to spend hours daily pouring over threads and absorbing valuable information, now I spend minutes a day glancing at threads and trying to filter good information among personal attacks and misleading info.
While it is against the TOS to mount personal attacks, it is equally wrong to present misleading information, pretend to be an expert on a particular subject matter without anything to back it up, or posting for the pure purpose of inciting heated responses.
I have already more or less withdrew myself from participating in DOs, I never did post that much to begin with, and if a suitable solution cannot be found regarding trolling and personal attacks, I doubt I will be doing much reading in the future either.</font>
Amen... and same here.
I do not post nearly as much on the airline or hotel forums anymore because I get tired of petty debates over the validity of ones experience or opinion (which is particularly annoying when the "I never fly" folks spend time trying to discredit the ultra-frequent flyers").
I knew I was teetering on non-participation when I started automatically skipping any thread that had more than two pages of posts (assuming it had burst into a flame fest). Then I missed a couple of DOs and felt like all I had missed was the miles I would have spent flying.
I disagree that there is one "clique" running or manipulating anything... rather a bunch of people run amok. This ranges from folks in Chat who delight in spreading ridiculous rumors about other FTers to personal attacks to just needing knee-high waders to get through the sewage in most topics just to find anything of real value.
I have had at least a dozen FTers (all "true" frequent flyers with at least 1000 posts on FT) say to me in the last month that they are no longer finding even marginal value in what they are getting out of FT. And I seemed to have crossed the line myself in the past couple of weeks.
The thing is though, I don't think that there IS a solution to this... I've participated in bulletin board communities in the past and sooner or later they reach a certain critical mass and implode. My personal solution has always been to back away from the mess rather than to continue to contribute to it.