40% of the posts on MP are in counting or stream-of-consciousness threads

First, they need to be easily ignorable. I remember when FT Omni was almost unusable because most of the 1st page threads were counting games. If there's a "post padding" forum, that would do the trick.

Second, it potentially subverts the intention of the rating system. Whether the intent is to "reward" those who have truly contributed, or whether it's to help folks judge the credibility of other members, giving more than trivial credit for those who count a lot distorts the metric. Hopefully, the comments that tomh quoted above will address that.

So that's two pretty big if's, in my mind. But if those are both taken care of, then if others want to waste their days post-padding, it makes no difference to me.

For point one, the "private" silver forum has been free of that stuff, so if the primary OT forum is full of them, it really isn't an issue. (although it will take newbies longer to hit silver after Mar. 1, but that still isn't a biggie).

For your second point, Randy has made it very clear that he has a lot of flexible tools in the rating algorithm. This far, despite us being a group dedicated to "gaming the system" (what is being a frequent flier all about, anyway?) he has been at least one step ahead of us on all of this. I'm confident he has a lot more "tricks" to pull out as MP reaches its initial maturaty. So, I'm not concerned at all about the "credibility" issue.

There's a private silver forum?

I guess I haven't counted enough to gain access to that.

announced in the help files, under status. You probably need about 20 more posts or 25 more likes to get there, current threshold is 100 points.

It's a very nice place, lots of good friendly banter about MP, some good ideas have come out of there. It's something to look forward to.

and even some more threads there re: post and like padding threads!

It is an active current topic, with a variety of opinions.

I can not see how this thread is any better than the threads that are being complained about. It looks to me as some of the members that are doing the complaining here are just trying to get their own post count up without going over to the dark side . I would put a smiley face here but they are not on the iPad. I do not mean to cause any offense and my criticism should be taken in good faith.

+1

I would agree with that - page after page of various threads complaining about padding posts

I actually learned more about the members themselves in the 'like' threads than elsewhere. they are quite a sociable bunch in there

I do agree that they should be ignorable and shouldn't be the first threads one sees when logging on.

I

I just liked the whole 6 pages of comments here, a lot easier than working through the 1000+ pages of friendly banter on the " I want to be liked " thread. We all like to be liked and we like liking others, welcome to post padding This thread certainly qualifies.

The time has come to kill off those countuing threads: nothing to do with miles

I think the counting of miles and points, awards and rewards has a lot to do with their appearance here

I really like this thread

I like your reply

Define true contribution to beta testing. And does likeathon contributes more than other threads in this case? Below is something you might find it useful

Post Numbering Duplicate Issue

testing the servers