Don't forget CC as well.

+ 1

Is this the appropriate forum for discussion of a divise, frequently argued issue by TalkBoard candidates?

Retrospective reduction of post counts which I understand the OP is proposing, is something that should be debated as a TB election issue, if it has not been covered.

I'd be interested in every candadate's position:
What is your position on proposing changes to the retrospective and prospective counting of posts in FlyerTalk forums?

Randy, I recall you gave an explanation of this issue this year, regarding your decision on the implementation of non-counting of OMNI posts.

Further wholesale changes to FlyerTalk would be disappointing, but if TalkBoard has any say in the matter, I'd appreciate knowing where candidates stand. Thanks. ^

I had and apologies for doing so.

And I can't express it any better than these posts:
Here.

And this post:
Here.

And this post:
Here.

Again, did you miss the question that did you or did you not willfully pad your post count or were you really interested in going to AMS. If you were really interested in going to AMS, like the others, then really what is this all about?

But I have to admit, I haven't had such a laugh in a long time. Let's see, your solution, even after 16 days of thinking about how you would invent a better mousetrap would be to solicit the TalkBoard for a recommendation (I took about 1.6 minutes... you might read this excellent book Blink.). Let's review (tick-tock, tick-tock) what took you 16 days to come up with (tick-tock, tick-tock). That sound you hear, is the clock ticking for the tickets to expire AND for the winners to have a respectable amount of time to plan on going. Remember, time off from work, purchase connecting airline tickets ... under the expensive two week booking window ... get a pet sitter, you know, things that are truly wonderful when other respect that time is important to making decisions.

RichMSN's 16-Day Well Thought Out Plan for AMS tickets (the TalkBoard solution):
- A minimum of 48 hours must elapse after a topic has been raised by a TalkBoard member either in the public TalkBoard Topics forum or in the private TalkBoard forum, before any member of the TalkBoard can make a motion regarding that issue. This is a minimum time and it often lasts longer. For instance, it took 190 days for the TalkBoard to come to a common agreement on the recent guidelines. Uh, RichMSN, the tickets for AMS were only valid for a bit more than a month before all winners had to be back.....
- Once a motion has been made and seconded the President shall post a sticky poll thread in the TalkBoard forum calling the question and announcing the vote. Regular motions shall be kept open for a period of two weeks from the posting of the sticky poll...
- The purpose of posting voting topics in the public TalkBoard Topics forum is to solicit member feedback on any motions that are up for a vote and to allow for comments after a vote is made.
- Then a few members would surely have opposed anything the TalkBoard would have recommended and then the TalkBoard would have had to defend their thoughts on this after a week or so of comments and then we would have had to start all over.

Guess what, while your advice is teetering on the hopes that the TalkBoard could come to some agreement of the best recommendation for this, the members I selected are already leaving to go to AMS and more than likely will all be back before your solution ever had the proper consideration. Looking at the guidelines above, we're talking a minimum of 16 days - A MINIMUM. I'm not sure what political party is accused of being for more government, but this seems to be similar.

Fault my approach as much as you want, but at least my guys will actually be able to use these wonderful gifts on behalf of FlyerTalk, while yours may just have been mired in "bureaucratic red tape." Like I said, some walk ... others talk.

But RichMSN, all humor aside, you have to admit, even my solution got you involved, not once but 12 times. Pretty cool huh? And you know what is even cooler, I never thought for once that you were post padding.

And for those tuning in, I'm actual a big fan of RichMSN and have enjoyed his participation in the recent TalkBoard Debates and am glad that he again ran for one of the open positions on the TalkBoard. While we may see things different in this case, I want to make absolute sure that every member that reads this understands I have the same respect for members whose thoughts differ from mine as I do for members whose thoughts are similar. RichMSN is, has been and I hope will continue to be a valuable member of FlyerTalk for a long, long time.

And RichMSN, don't think ... Blink!

Look, it's pretty obvious what is going on here and no one, least of all Randy, should be blamed for going along with the business plan of the site owner.

The owner of FT, Interstate Brands, wants page views to increase, presumably so that ad exposure increases, leading to revenue increases. It would also be normal that there are financial incentives tied to these corporate goals for some employees.

Virtually every action that has been taken recently, including the recent announcement of prizes for playing "Who will be the next person to post," suggests this process is well underway.

Yes, my evidence is circumstantial, but circumstantial evidence is all we're likely to get. If circumstantial evidence is conclusive enough, it is sufficient.

Will this degrade FT? Almost certainly, but the degradation will be reduced significantly for those of us who are here for the original travel purpose if the area that is pumped up is just OMNI. And except for the recent Amsterdam ticket giveaway, that's been the case.

So please run all the prize contests in OMNI, bring the folks who don't care about travel into that forum, and keep the rest of FT true to its original purpose.

Do you really believe in the "Blink" stuff? Personally, I do to a certain extent -- I will come to a rapid conclusion in my world but then pass that through my trusted advisers and colleagues to either confirm or rebuke it.

In terms of the post-padding: Could've fooled me. It felt like you were accusing me of exactly that earlier in this thread. I've posted 12 times on threads many times and, really, my post count was the furthest thing on my mind when I did. I was planning on posting once, but something caught my eye and I posted more than once.

But it doesn't matter.

My point was and is this: It was seen as a cool way to post a lot, have those posts count, and try for a trip to AMS. This less than a year after deciding out of the blue that posts in OMNI wouldn't count anymore because people were seen as post padding. This bugged me as someone who really liked OMNI for what it was the past few years (until this year).

I just think OMNI has taken it on the chin way too many times the past few years, despite you saying many times that you are a fan. You've closed OMNI, you avoided appointing moderators to OMNI because you didn't want to subject moderators to that, you eliminated post counts, you split OMNI into two parts, you opened up OMNI to the world, you appointed two moderators to OMNI.

To me, only the appointment of the two moderators have been a positive step recently, but that probably should've been done a long time ago.

I keep seeing you say are a fan of OMNI, but the life has been sucked out of it for many people who used to participate regularly. To those who dislike OMNI, this is probably a good thing. But to many of us who grew to enjoy OMNI, things just aren't the same anymore. I just wonder what was so broken about OMNI on January 1 of this year that you felt such a need to change it into what it is now?

I do have a great deal of appreciation for all that you've put into this site - all I'm asking is that you sit back and examine the changes you've put into place in the past year, TALK to some of the regular participants to get some honest feedback, and think about whether all of these changes are positive and whether there are some that maybe should not have been put into place.

To those who think I am being a bit too rude to our host, I apologize for that, but Randy and I have had a pretty good give and take and, trust me, I don't take anything Randy says personally and I hope he doesn't either.

Thank you, you put together what I wanted to express.

While the post count CAN serve as an indicator how competent the answer is, how do you differ if a majority of these posts were utter bs or quality discussions about FF topics.

Then again, its an internet board and we will never get an answer where we know if it's 100% correct or not. Unless we try and see how it works.

But my question remains: HOW is it possible to generate such a massive amount of posts (e.g. 35K) within 2 years ? Some longterm FT members and Moderators on our biggest boards do not have these amount of posts.

The Debate Forum is closed as the election already started and many people put in their vote already.

OMNI was discussed and it's probably important to say that I expressed my positive opinion about that forum. My issue with post counts does not relate in any way to disliking specific forums but is more a general concern.

Easy, if you sit at your computer and post a number in a counting game all day, every day for a few months. Actually, do it in a few different threads too.

IMHO, the few people who did this were the major cause of Omni posts no longer counting. Guess what? After the change was made the counting games stopped.

Again, it was another feature abused by a few and instead of dealing with those few, the feature was taken away - post counts, in this case.

So, excepting a few people who actually post alot of relevant information in other forums for years, many of those you see with 35,000+ posts got them from counting for months in Omni last year.

Let's say slowed instead as there have been counting game threads introduced since posts in OMNI stopped counting, such as this one.

They actually went back to normal. We always had 1 or 2 running. For a few months, the entire first page of threads were these type of post padding threads.

They made Omni virtually un-navigable because it was so difficult to wade thru them to get to the real threads.

And for the most part I agree, though think it wrong to single these out as the only offenders as game threads were around long before these. The biggest offenders? Yes.

Agree with all of this. OVMV.

Cheers.

I can't guess what's behind the decision to open up OMNI. I am not Randy afterall.

However, I was switching my security suite last week and have been tweaking my system. I have to pay attention to how my system behaves so I can adjust the setup/settings.

Something caught my eyes after the switch. My FT sessions kind of slowed down and I didn't know why and what's causing it. Due to the slowness, I was able to see the site data transmission messages at the bottom of the Firefox browser. It appeared that my FT visits had been sending data to different places. One site stood out: google-analytics.

Ironically, I googled and found this:
Maybe FT has been on Google Analytics for a long time. I don't know. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't changed my internet security suite and my system hadn't slowed down. Because I didn't like the slowness, I followed some online advice and installed a (free) web proxy. Being non-techie, I'd never dreamed of needing a web proxy and installing it myself.

Now I know my system is back to the normal speed and my FT privacy is not part of google's tasks.