For all we know, someone who doesn't post much might come to FT regularly and read posts, search, etc. without logging in. Purging the account would seem like an unwelcoming gesture that really doesn't have an obvious benefit to anyone.

However, it might not be bad <I'm not advocating this, just pointing it out as a logical possibility> to have a recent activity requirement (maybe in addition to our OMNI/CC time and posts access criteria) for certain privileges such as voting in addition to OMNI/CC and possibly even DO participation. If someone joined FT ten years ago, made 200 posts in the first few months and then disappeared, should they now have CC trading privileges, be allowed to vote, or be given scarce space at a DO that is turning others away? Perhaps this is something to think about.

I know that I was a member of another board and I hadn't posted in years - my id was terminated for lack of use.

I didn't feel unwelcome - I just registered again :)

If anything, the spammer IDs should be removed. They cause nothing but grief to the mods and won't feel unwelcomed - they're already been suspended :D

If we know that they're just spammers, fine, but IMO we shouldn't terminate accounts of regular people who have been suspended, no matter how long they have remained suspended.

I am active on City-data.com/forum and I like the ability to say you find a post helpful. In that forum, there's no ID of the person who approves the post unless they add their name in a comments section in the top right hand of the poster's information. What I do find (other than the ubiquitous thumbs up for birthday's and the like) is that a lot of people are encouraged to really think through their posts, which makes the forum very helpful. There are no thumbs-down icons, however, which I like

Excellent example.

Correction gleefully accepted! :D

That's an interesting point. Maybe this would be as harmless as you think. I'd like to discuss it further.

Suppose we had a per-post Helpful button displaying the total for each post but not showing any summary data anywhere on FT. Considering just OMNI/PR, what other worst-case scenarios can we think of? Everyone please chime in, because I virtually never visit OMNI/PR. I need the expertise of regular participants there.

Edited to add: Oooooh, I made post 666! :eek:

:D:D:D

Please do; absent tangible side effects, I've been genuinely baffled at how this can be gamed.

I'd prefer the likes on a given post to be non-anonymous (or perhaps, like Facebook, aggregating plus a click through for the full list if you get more than a couple likes.) I don't think anonymous totals give as much value, since it doesn't at that point substitute for a "+1" posts, etc.

I'm not sure what the down side to having a relatively discreet aggregate number (e.g. on the profile page), although I don't see that there's any gain to it, either.

Where this gets dangerous would be if IB started a "trending posts" (which got a lot of likes) or started prioritizing posts by likes rather than chronologically, or if there's a downvote option (not sure which is worse, anonymous or not, but both have serious downsides.)

1. Trending by unmonitored software would be dangerous. But a person choosing items for the FlyerTalk home page could make good use of Helpful count to identify candidates.

2. Changing thread display according to Helpful ratings was once something I favored. As you say, it carries gaming danger. I no longer favor this complication. It also sounds hard to implement.

3. Downvotes carry danger, probably mitigated by not allowing the total to go below zero. I'm not interested in pursuing any downvote feature until we have extensive experience with an upvote only system.

I suppose you're right w.r.t helping manual curation; it couldn't hurt, at any rate.

I think it might be helpful on a very narrow handful of the forums, where our general conversational format doesn't apply, but special casing those doesn't seem like a good use of the effort (e.g, if we're going to special case something for mileage run deals, the ability to attach meta tags to the posts (especially airline, expired, cities) and then filter on those would be much, much more useful.

That mitigation helps if upvotes and downvotes are both anonymous; non-anonymous down-votes are way too likely to be read as flames.

OMNI P/R isn't the only venue where a 'helpful' button could be misused as the "Trick It" thread and MS forum are others that come to my mind. I'm not sure if I'd consider misuse in those forums nor OMNI P/R as "harmless" but that's merely MHO.

Good to hear as I'm in the camp that doesn't feel we actually need this at all.

By misuse, do you just mean "someone clicks like on something factually incorrect," and someone else misinterprets that count of likes to mean it's correct? (Obviously not an issue with P/R, as it's all silly opinions.)

Or are you expecting some practical result out of the use of the button?

Not 'like', 'helpful' as I said in my post.

I have yet to see any valid reason why this is "needed". Just a lot of "other boards have this, so we should too".

I have left other forums because they added things like this.

I don't find the semantics all that different, and certainly on OMNI P/R, nobody's going to suddenly start finding the unhelpful political chatter helpful because someone clicked on it.

Even if labelled "helpful" or "thanks," I don't think many users are going to be so unsophisticated as to automatically assume content is more valid because it got what are in essence "likes," but if other folks think that it's confusing or misleading then that's a good argument for using a more neutral term.

Why? It doesn't seem to cause any problems on TripAdvisor. Sure, T/A has its own problems; but this isn't one of them, IMO.


If only television commentators during U.S. elections understood this. They simply calculate the difference between the percentages and report this. So, in this case, 20, not 51. Grrrr.....


I used to be in the campaign management and polling business in the U.S. 55/45 was a clear victory. Much above that, and certainly above 60/40, the loser was often said (in the business) to have "received the beating s/he richly deserved."