Forgive me, as this is my very first post in your forum. But as I was looking for a specific forum to ask about using OnePass airline points for hotels and cars, I surfed along and found an ongoing forum debate over turning off post counts because of post padding.

Again, this is just my suggestion:

I happen to be a moderator and administrator at another worldwide forum that uses the same software as this forum does (at least in generic form). We had the same challenge five years ago and wanted to reward our longtime members with both a graduated User Title that is based on an increase in their post counts, as well as provide a solution to allow other members to pad all day long in forum areas where they could. Once the changes were made (which only took 30 minutes), all 50,000+ forum members are happy now.

Here is what we did:

1) With over 200+ forums and sub-forums, our team decided which forums would be designated as chit-chat, nonsense postings, games, puzzles, just about anything that did not have to do with the meat and potatoes of our main forum mission. Once those forums were designated, we simply went in the Administrators Control Panel (CP) and manually turned OFF the option that allows each post in that forum to be conted toward a Post Count.

2) For very large off-topic threads in the other forums, we simply moved tem to the chit-chat forums and performed a forum maintenance which reduced post counts for some members who were either padding or posting chats. Yes, we had a few debates, but they were few and far between because everyone agreed to have their own clubhouse forum for whatever purpose they needed.

3) For those members whose posts added to the overall quality of the forums, the admins awarded an avatar SEAL LOGO to the member. (I see that the avatar option is turned off here for members)

Summary: In the end everyone had their favorite forums to participate in, including the padders, and those who worked very hard to contribute with posts with something more than a quick hello were awarded in the forums with a post count.

Your thoughts?

Allen