Originally Posted by Randy Petersen

If permitted, I'd like to step back a second so that some of you can appreciate where i am coming from in my posts to this issue and this thread....

What I am grappling with here is what i had hoped FlyerTalk to be. You've suggested that this Web site is a good reference for additional emoticons: SlickDeals as examples of emoticons that can express additional feelings toward either a topic or a member. Honestly, that is not at all what i thought we were doing in creating FlyerTalk. The two brands or Web sites that I am more closely comfortable with for being my virtual mentors is Fodors.comand Conde Nast Traveler. At neither of these well known and very professional brands Web sites, do you see anything close to the topic we are discussing here. These two are what i had hoped we might become. But, as it is, when i first decided years ago to allow input and a share of the direction of FlyerTalk, I perhaps naievely thought that those members who had grow along with my direction of FlyerTalk, would recognize this and want to continue that path, or more appropriately, that aspiration. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps i just don't get it any more. If that's what it is, then cool, I'll step aside and hope that FlyerTalk makes those decisions that can best represent the rest of its members. But for me, I remain committed to making FlyerTalk just a cut above the others and as a result, I will state my challenge to this idea.