I like to think of FlyerTalk as a friendly place that offers some of the best information available to frequent traveler. I question what message those who are opposed to letting users opt in to one or two simple features that allow them to better communicate and express themselves want to present, especially in this case, where those opt-in features would default to "off" and not affect non-participants in any way.

Among the boards I am active on, both as poster and moderator, FT is the dullest, visually. It is indeed possible to have a board that is both serious and allows expression - take this example, which has available nearly 70 smileys, allows avatars, and manages to support a large number of users - many who are quite passionate about the subjects at hand.

The straw man of "those" boards with all the non-serious looking and unsubstantive posting doesn't apply to FT. "Those" boards are not FT and a comparison can't be drawn unless one of the crowd who seems to prefer that FT look like the WSJ can point us to an example of a large board with a close-knit community that contributed thousands of on-topic, valuable posts each week and then, once people got to put a picture below their name, turned into one big Technicolor OMNI with rows of barfing smileys and pornography.