if you read the rest of my posts i am very against limiting this forum, i meerly picked the month prior to the OP's join date as a cut off to ilistrate a point about the redicolousnes of picking an arbitrary date

ok my bad.

Yes it is. :D


... now I need someone to quote this who joined before me. :D



All of this stuff is out there in the blogosphere. Much more damage is done by casual blog readers than FT readers. At least one is able to learn and question here before totally screwing the pooch ...

You would be mistaken. Although you may find it hard to believe, not everyone here is out to exploit other individuals. Perhaps you've been reading a bit too much Nietzsche

Talk of restrictions tends to encourage folks to boost their post count. Do we really want the more silent members posting daily accounts of their latest visit to the Money Center?

Szamboti, iflyjetz, kcblakely, planeluvr.

Despite my best efforts to avoid being misunderstood, either you haven't read all of what I wrote or I really am just being unclear, so I will try to provide a better understanding.

If you read posts again, you will find that I have not made any comments in support of choosing a "join by date" as a means to control access. In fact, I don't believe I've made any reference to any join date being an acceptable measure and this is intentional. Primarily, this is because I believe that setting a join date eliminates future participation from others, and to me, that is undesirable. (And as a side note, join date really doesn't offer much… there are years older vets that have posts in the multi-thousands and some that have less than 200.)

My proposal is to limit participation until you have made a to-be-determined level of contribution to the FT community. I don't yearn to preclude people from gaining knowledge from this forum, but I do wish to preclude people that have either A. No real understanding of the whole game; or B. No intention of making a positive contribution to others that frequent this forum.

Although I probably haven't made it apparent already, I think the proliferation of education is a positive thing, and that as a community, we stand to learn lots from each other. I'm not aiming to make this a club for the good ole boys, but rather a club for those that respect the facets of a mutually beneficial relationship.

Cheers

In all honesty, I actually find that information to be at least marginally useful. Although it would be much more so if the locations were more explicit so as to provide trend information

.....

You do see the issue here, right? People aren't allowed to participate until they have participated enough?

That aside, I think such a proposal is short-sighted. Everyone has a learning curve between newbie and pro. The community benefits from having a lot of pros. If you deliberately make the learning curve difficult, then over time the number of pros will decrease (natural attrition - people will find a new hobby, stop posting online, have their most convenient method disappear and not be interested in whatever's next).

Finally, neither number of posts nor length of membership are useful metrics even of the value of contributions to date, let alone potential to contribute. If what you want really is an exclusive club (and as I said, I think building such a club would be short sighted) you need to have someone or several someones reading aspiring members' posting histories.

^

I understood exactly what RFD was aiming for. However, I think it would be counterproductive. While it's a PITA to educate some here, it's better to do that and have some deals last longer than simply have these same people read blogs and screw up the deals even faster.

TB would have to vote on it, like tom911 said, and it's not likely they would vote for it. Due to the public nature of FT, and there's nothing (other than CC) that's limited to the public, people have taken the awesome deals off FT and only discuss outside of FT, to prevent certain deals/tricks from the FWF/SD deaths many deals on those sites get.


Yup. FT (aka Internet Brands) would rather have massive amounts of new people, rather than have some parts of FT locked down, to keep the private traffic on FT. Instead, people go outside of FT to discuss the great deals.

If we are to exclude people who haven’t been her very long, or don’t have a certain # of posts, then we should also exclude:

- Those who state they don’t like to share information citing the reason as once too many people know about a good deal it will get shut down.
- Those who use various techniques on these forums to extreme as they are ultimately responsible for good deals getting shut down.
- Those who have been members for a long time but have very low participation as they are obviously lurkers and leeches.
- Those with spelling errors in their posts, obviously they lack “the proper know how”.
- Those who have stated they do not pay off their balances in full every month, a clear sign of lacking “the proper know how”.
- Those who don’t have health insurance, if they don’t care about their health they obviously don’t care about MS.
- Anyone who purchased a Ford Pinto prior to the gas tank recall or a Delorean, no further comment necessary.

If we do decide to limit participation, the only proper way to do so is by individual testing to determine who has “the proper know how”. Given the size of our community, I suggest a 40 question multiple choice exam, no grading curve, passing score 90% or higher.

Yes, the above is all tongue in cheek. It’s not our or the forum’s job to protect people from themselves and there is no accurate way to determine who needs protecting and who does not. And OP’s initial premise (“very bad consequences for everyone”) is also flawed; it’s simply an opinion. There is no credible evidence that newbies or those who lack “the proper know how” create any issues for anyone else.

As a suggestion, if the OP desires a more limited and exclusive membership, perhaps OP should seek out other forums which meet those criteria or OP should start his own forum.

Great idea, But it should be anyone who joined after 12/31/2010 should not gain access

since you joined in 2/11 guess you wouldn't have access any longer. FT has been thru this samething with a # of other fourms. Funny that those who propose these closing of the forums only want it for newcomers which they themselves were only a short time ago.

Sorry I always think when these things are proposed its in order to try and keep the info from getting spread further and maybe the shutdown of whatever

Did I stutter? Did you see me saying we should use the join date to discriminate?

Because you have me quite confused

I don't see any way for people who aren't allowed access to make the necessary positive contributions to be granted access. Unless you mean they need to contribute to other FT forums besides MS to gain access to MS?

You'll lose good members that way. I almost never visit the other FT forums. I recently joined FT after years on FWF specifically for the MS forum. I focus on cash instead of miles, and don't travel often--vacation trips are usually to visit family. The flights I need are not expensive to purchase, so I wouldn't get very good value for miles. I prefer cashback (or Arrival card) instead.

If the MS forum had been closed to new members, I would not have found the other forums to be very useful, so I would not have have stayed around.

I realize that I'm not the most prolific poster--and don't expect to be. I'm just under 600 posts on FW after 6 years. Mostly because I don't feel the need to post redundant info and someone usually beats me to answering questions. I find myself typing up replies and then not hitting send when I ask myself: "Does this post warrant adding to the length of the topic"?

What I have found is that the MS forum contains much more useful information than FWF on the topic of MS. I do hope that people here find my contributions valuable, even if my post count isn't as high as my cashback balance.