FlyerTalk Forums - Suggestion: Keep Post Counts & Use Post Padding Solution?

Many thanks for the comments and welcome to FlyerTalk. The good news is that we have used some of the very same methods and considerations that you describe in your post. And while we have considered avatars, we have wanted to more closely associate ourselves with the content among members. We're likely to continue along the same path that got us here. It's really not that major an issue is an issue at all. Most of the members you see posting here would have some sort of opinion even if i was posting that dawn signals the start of a day or the end of a night.

As you might guess, fixation of things like this is a natural to those who are fixated if the balances of their frequent flyer programs.

I'm comfortable feeling that a vast majority of members on FlyerTalk continue to focus on the value of the content posted about their love for frequent flyer miles and points and we'll do just fine to remind ourselves of that from time to time. As for post counting - our volunteer moderators are pretty adept at spotting such trends and i myself have clipped the wings of a few who mindlessly thought they could gain entrance to the hallows of Coupon Connection.

Again thanks and with your experience with other boards, we all look forward to any contributions you may make to FlyerTalk, both in content and thoughts on operations. Cheers.

And for all others, thanks for the information posted here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Visitor200

Forgive me, as this is my very first post in your forum. But as I was looking for a specific forum to ask about using OnePass airline points for hotels and cars, I surfed along and found an ongoing forum debate over turning off post counts because of post padding.

Again, this is just my suggestion:

I happen to be a moderator and administrator at another worldwide forum that uses the same software as this forum does (at least in generic form). We had the same challenge five years ago and wanted to reward our longtime members with both a graduated User Title that is based on an increase in their post counts, as well as provide a solution to allow other members to pad all day long in forum areas where they could. Once the changes were made (which only took 30 minutes), all 50,000+ forum members are happy now. :)

Here is what we did:

1) With over 200+ forums and sub-forums, our team decided which forums would be designated as chit-chat, nonsense postings, games, puzzles, just about anything that did not have to do with the meat and potatoes of our main forum mission. Once those forums were designated, we simply went in the Administrators Control Panel (CP) and manually turned OFF the option that allows each post in that forum to be conted toward a Post Count.

2) For very large off-topic threads in the other forums, we simply moved tem to the chit-chat forums and performed a forum maintenance which reduced post counts for some members who were either padding or posting chats. Yes, we had a few debates, but they were few and far between because everyone agreed to have their own clubhouse forum for whatever purpose they needed.

3) For those members whose posts added to the overall quality of the forums, the admins awarded an avatar SEAL LOGO to the member. (I see that the avatar option is turned off here for members)

Summary: In the end everyone had their favorite forums to participate in, including the padders, and those who worked very hard to contribute with posts with something more than a quick hello were awarded in the forums with a post count.

Your thoughts?

Allen