BillScann

I am in favor of OMNI reunification and will vote accordingly if elected to TalkBoard.

ajax

I'm perfectly okay with the idea of a split. It's good to enjoy OMNI without the political and religious extremists hijacking the entire board.

That being said, it can sometimes feel like wandering into the lion's den when going into OMNI P/R. There's something about the 'feel' of the board which allows a much lower standard of decency and decorum in posts.

To be blunt about it, many posters in the OMNI P/R forum (or maybe just the most vocal/prominent ones) are just nastier than would be allowed in other forums. And I, for one, think that's rather sad.

Cholula

It's a symptom I like to call Web Rage which is the online equivalent of Road Rage.

It often occurs when booting up your computer, opening your favorite web browser and then logging into FlyerTalk. Suddenly your blood pressure starts rising, your eyes turn into slits, steam starts rising out of your ears and you start mumbling profanities under your breath as you uncontrollably click on OMNI/PR.

After an hour or so of venting in that forum, all mental and physical bodily functions return to normal and you head out into the regular travel forums of FlyerTalk as a model citizen.

We see this all the time. Nothing to be alarmed about IMO. Think of OMNI/PR as a pressure valve for the rest of Flyertalk.

PTravel

And restore a minimum post qualification for entry. OMNI shouldn't be the training-wheels of FlyerTalk.

PTravel

I have found just the opposite. The discussions in OMNI P/R are, almost always, either respectful or funny, whereas I've stopped following threads I've started in UA and AA because of the incredibly nasty responses I've gotten.

As for OMNI P/R being a lion's den, only if you have an opinion with nothing to back it up -- those people tend to get eaten alive. Those with facts and grounds supporting their opinions make for interesting discussion.

RichMSN

+1

magiciansampras

I'm confused by something, Randy. Since when are you for looking at the number of users who support a particular policy as an indication of what should be done? In this thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showp...&postcount=121) you explicitly reject the idea that 50 people can accurately reflect the will of the OMNI population when it comes to opening it up to Google. Yet here you seem willing to take a far smaller percentage of the population as an indication of what members prefer.

Why the discrepancy?

MikeMpls

I spend more time in OMNI than before. Leave it split.

nsx

This is what makes the decision complicated: We really can't tell how many new people will drift into OMNI and stick around where in past years they might have been repelled by the political and religious threads. If you ask only the people who frequented OMNI when it was all together, your sample is incomplete and the answer may therefore be incorrect.

In the end, this is a judgment call, a guess of how things will eventually work out. No poll that can answer this question. Randy's judgment might be wrong, but usually it's right. We'll find out over time based on whether total OMNI traffic continues to grow consistently with the rest of FT.

the_happiness_store

You're definitely wrong about this. I have noticed the steam spurting out of my nose and fogging up the monitor so I can no longer see what I'm responding to.

iff

So if OMNI gets put back together, what happens when the next election rolls around? Will it be split again? Wouldn't it be better to just choose one or the other and stick with it?

With the current global economic situation and the new admininstration, no doubt there will be a good deal of political talk for some time to come.

That said, I'm ambivalent about the split: It has its positives and negatives. The fact that OMNI is open to Google is much more disturbing to me, but that's a different subject.

My two centimes, for as little as those are worth these days!

Randy Petersen

Like to clarify something here. It's not my poll. I wasn't looking for anything specific and i actually had nothing to do with the poll, just a rogue Moderator i think!

At the end of the day, a judgement call by me based on my actual experience over the past several years of seeing up front the contentious issues that politics and religion has at times. In fact, it is highly likely that no other single member has seen these contentious items as close as i have and that is something that might be considered by anyone reading in. I think most of us are aware that an outside view and more often, even a ringside view is not nearly the same as the view from the center. As I also explained elsewhere, I did my research and watched and compared considerations with another Web site that actually had far more traffic than FlyerTalk and got their reasons, experience and more importantly, their results since their change was a number of months ago and thus i could trust that they were able to look back over a period of time to see the results. Anyway, hope this helps you get a much more clear picture of this and again, the poll is only a reference point that i stumbled upon. You might respect as well it is always difficult to do any polls since they can be considered the tool of the activist and not necessarily the result of the population. You know, we all this solely on a volunteer basis and try to make as best decisions we can. Now, I do appreciate that there are the armchair quarterbacks and back-seat drivers on FlyerTalk, just as there are on any issues, but generally speaking our gut instinct decisions on what has been right for FlyerTalk has been fairly good, witness the continued growth of Flyer
Talk and for me personally, the increased value of information which I'm able to take advantage of because of the good intentions of our other members.

Randy Petersen

Actually I wasn't and you will note or perhaps missed that the poll is not mine not was i involved in its inception. I had only stumbled upon it and given the idea from koko, just thought he might like to have a point-of-reference.

Cholula

100% correctamundo.

Pizzaman and I started this poll and signed Randy's name to it as well as he's one of the OMNI moderators. I don't think we even told Randy about it...he just ran across it recently, AFAIK, when he was doing some research.

Randy Petersen

While I'll forgive you for misspelling my name, i think it wonderful that you have an opinion. As a candidate, and again, thanks for your participation this year, you might want to make sure that you also acknowledge the experiences of others. I think you'll find reference in this thread of members who's opinion of the PR part of OMNI is sort of threatening and you might have seen overtime that OMNI had become sort of a joke on FT and that is really unacceptable. While it can be challenging, the truth is I have converted to trying to protect OMNI and thought is best, as per my comments elsewhere on this thread (look at the considerations I made before the decision) to make the change so that from the first glance, OMNI reflects a pretty welcoming and pleasant category of off-topic threads that can encourage participation rather than on occasion (thus the jokes about OMNI) the threat of OMNI. Agree or not, I would only ask that at least you spend some time trying to read and understand the points that may be different than yours.

Again, thanks for your participation in this years TalkBoard elections and hope to see your involvement next year as well.