Originally Posted by bdjohns1

Once upon a time, I think I made a suggestion either here or in ORP that we have a "thumbs-up" system for good threads/posts. You can only nudge a thread up, not down. The big problem with the previous reputation system was that some twits decided to be tools and give 0-1 ratings to birthday threads in communityBuzz (among other things).

In my day job, one of the challenges I have to work with is the development of meaningful metrics for production facilities at my company. The first rule is that to make a metric meaningful, it has to be visible. We've assigned great meaning to post counts because it's the only metric we've got visible in thread view. Develop a good metric that's resistant to gaming (hey, there's an actual productive thing TB could do since they seem to be struggling to find actual issues!), and the world will beat a path to your door.

Here's an idea:

All posts count. The "reputation" score is calculated on a forum basis - a ratio of "thumbs-up" posts to total posts in that forum (along with some scaling factors to account for number of participants, forum size, etc). This probably wouldn't be a real-time metric, but could be crunched at 2a on Sunday or something. I might be considered to be a good source of info in Travel Photography and have a great rep score there. I'd probably have a decent score on UA. I'd have no score on CO.

This seems fair to me because it doesn't disenfranchise people. OMNI serves a valuable purpose around here - it's got its own community (hence the significant traffic devoted to this issue) even if it isn't strictly germane to the subject of miles and points. People like to talk with people they've got something in common with, even if it's to count by prime numbers, guess who's going to post next, or make fun of people who think lanyards are a good idea. At the same time, it preserves the ability to recognize valuable contributions in each forum.

Personally, I don't care if I ever get to be an FT Evangelist. I'll have fun in OMNI regardless of whether my posts count or not, but Randy's unilateral decision (and the sketchy "oops" explanation that doesn't seem to be substantiated by the record) rubs me the wrong way, hence my comment over on ORP that with respect to him, I'll vote with my wallet and not renew my InsideFlyer subscription next time it comes due this fall. Unless IB got InsideFlyer as part of the deal, that still hits Randy's bottom line. I'll also probably look disfavorably on TB members who rubber-stamp Randy on this.