I'm not sure how this would take a lot of money and resources to do. The metrics I spoke of, 1) length of FT membership, 2) frequency of site visits, 3) number of postings are already tracked by FT and/or easily obtained. All the work that is involved is to take those variables and develop some sort of composite metric that would more fairly allow users access to CC and OMNI.

The qualitative metric might be more difficult to do and perhaps this might be something that would take more time to figure out. Poo Pooing something has "too difficult" and "too costly" might not exactly be the most productive way of improving FT for everyone. Instead, perhaps we can work together to find ways to achieve things cost-effectively.

I have only 82 postings and you have over 8,000. Thinking of the FT community as a whole, what limits should be placed on my participation on FT? What is a meaningful metric can be used to describe how your postings and contributions are different from mine? If FT limits access to certain parts of the FT community, then I think absolute transparency regarding the reason for the exclusion and the criteria for entry should be explained and posted.

I think everyone here should have access to each and every forum from the day they join FT, but I don't run the place or make the rules (of course, that would likely mean a lot more work for moderators in some forums that have posting restrictions now- OMNI and CC - as there would be many more posts to manage). There's been suggestions by some posters that Mileage Run have restrictions placed on it, too, to keep out new members.

Most bulletin board systems track and display the post count -- its fairly standard. It true that not every post may be of high quality, but in general, those members with higher post counts have at least shown some level of dedication and loyalty to the FT community. I think most members of a bulletin board community would appreciate this.

Tracking only the join date or membership date is not sufficient as there are undoubtedly many members who have joined, but only lurked since joining.

FWIW, there is, sadly, next to no support among current TB members for eliminating post counts.

I'd suggested, since the question has now been raised numerous times, by various members over the years, that we might abolish counting and/or dropping the prominent display of the member post count.

Like some others, I personally feel it has little, if any, meaning. I also note that it is a real "bone of contention" among certain members. IMHO, the benefit vs risk analysis equation suggests that we can easily do without it.

In the spirit of compromise, I'd also suggested that we, rather then eliminating an individual members post count entirely, instead consider having it appear only when a member actually clicks on the member profile in order to see it. This would be an improvement, IMHO, and a very nice compromise, I thought.

Again, even if we're not going to be rid of post counts, I thought we might try to subdue them somewhat.

Yet again, it seems that there is essentially no support from the TB for the idea of eliminating post counts, nor is there any support for simply moving post counts off the front page to the member profile. Thanks to all for your input.

Mark