Wow....took me a while to find this thread and what all of the buzz was about. Although I didn't read all 20 pages, I read enough posts to realize that people are REALLY bent about this proposal.
I don't really care much about post counts - without a reputation system (which I seem to recall was piloted once and dumped), the counts are irrelevant. I could just as easily drool and threadcrap my way through all of the "core" travel boards as I could through some of the less information-heavy community or OMNI boards. Or I could impart thousands of posts of delicious wisdom across all of the above
- the point is, without a simple peer review system (like reputation points), it is meaningless.
I like OMNI. I post there, but have never really gotten involved in the games. (Frankly, I don't understand their appeal.) I don't care if someone pads their count in games - I'm going to judge them based on their meaningful material, whether that's a trip review, detailed advice on an FF program, or a well-thought-out political opinion in OMNI.
So, to me, this boils down to two things:
(1) Nothing is really broken. We don't get any benefits by crossing high post count thresholds. Nobody takes action on our advice because of post count. People judge us by our content quality, not quantity.
(2) Retroactively applying a rule to people just smacks of sleaziness. FT is better than that. We all bellyache like there's no tomorrow when one of our FF programs drops a change on us with zero notice. We're better than that, right?
I don't know what's technically feasible, but if we want to expand upon post count as a status metric, is it possible for mods (or simply the system) to recognize the most active posters on a given board? For example, if you have 20,000 posts on FT, that means nothing to me. But if you are the #3 most active poster on, say, the Hilton board, that might mean you have a lot of experience with the program. But again: I'm still going to make my opinion based on the content itself, not simply the post count.