Originally Posted by
BSpeaker
I am active on City-data.com/forum and I like the ability to say you find a post helpful. In that forum, there's no ID of the person who approves the post unless they add their name in a comments section in the top right hand of the poster's information. What I do find (other than the ubiquitous thumbs up for birthday's and the like) is that a lot of people are encouraged to really think through their posts, which makes the forum very helpful. There are no thumbs-down icons, however, which I like
It's interesting that some discussion forums seem to inherently contain a richer number of intelligent, knowledgeable, and friendly people, while others have a dearth of such. Yahoo! Answers is an example of the latter, but in my experience reading it from various Google search results, I've always found City-Data to have a strong supply of the former. (On a separate but related note, another consistently rich source of deep, almost expert-level discussion is at Ask Metafilter; whenever I see an Ask Metafilter result in a Google search, I instantly go there, because I know the quality of discussion will be exceptionally high.
While the quality of discussion on FT is often quite good, there are times when it isn't. It would be nice to replicate the level of discussion on those other communities here on FlyerTalk.