[TechGuy]

I'm personally of the opinion that posts in Random shouldn't be counted, but I know that there will be some people unhappy with that change of count. What do you think?

Count towards what - the title ? I think the question would evaporate if there was a title for Distinguished Tech-Help or Distinguished Tech-Support (no Random posts counted) as well as simply Distinguished Member (Random posts included). If the question relates to titles below the 2K level I don't feel there is a huge need to change anything - it's a can of worms you don't want to open.

I shall not officially vote as I officially do not care - if I log in tomorrow and my title is idiot or a**hole it won't matter to me.

[TechGuy]

I think this was mentioned in the other thread, but we have no capability of doing that -- titles in vB are based entirely on post count, not where those posts are... UNLESS we remove post counts for that forum.

[RandyG]

As I said before, if we can't improve the count, we should leave it alone till we can.

[angelize56]

I say leave things as they are. Maybe if this is such a great concern to some they could place a statement by their avatar as Tuppence2 and I have done. You can clearly see by our wording there that we are Randomizers and not techies. Thanks Mike for taking your valuable time to deal with this minor issue compared to the major ones you must run into here at TSG. Take care. angel

[littlemar]

I don't come to this site for the post counts and could care less. I'm here to try to help and along the way I've made some great friends. I have to honestly say I don't pay attention to anyone's count and that count doesn't indicate their intelligence. So who cares. Not me!

Looks like 'no opinion' is winning so far.

Poor Techguy, wouldn't want to be in your shoes What's going to happen if no 'opinion' wins out?
If it does, maybe you should decide, since you created this site

I'm running for cover

p.s. I could care less myself

[jakoval]

As I've stated before, for myself - personally - I don't care one way or another about post count. However, this is not about us - it's about them - the new members coming to the site for tech help. They need some indication as to the qualifications of the responders.

There is no perfect solution to this - as has been pointed out elsewhere, there are some extremely knowledgeable individuals who are relatively new to the site or who don't have as much time as others to offer help, and who therefore have relatively low post counts. There are also others who have asked many questions (sometimes the same ones over and over ), and thus have high post counts, but who are significantly less qualified to offer an opinion.

In spite of all this, I still feel that a Random-less post count offers the best compromise at this time. I don't wish to antagonize anyone, and it would be nice to have a more elegant solution - one that recognizes Random contributions to the TSG community separately - but I feel that Mike has enough on his plate without having to spend a lot of time on this. I voted no.

[Rhettman5.1]

Guess ya all know how I voted...Rhett
PS, only one Rhett voted .. I don't cheat ! ..Rhett

[angelize56]

The bad part of this whole thing is that if it turns out that member's post numbers are changed to exclude random posts...some members could take this the wrong way, feel insulted and leave TSG. Even if a member's posts are 100% in random...this makes them no less a member than the true techies. I honestly think things should be left as they are and just each member write a short blurb to be included by their avatar which would signal to newer members who is tech knowledgeable and who is not. Random posts are a large part of TSG and many of the posts are meaningful and even help is rendered there. Do you also exclude the posts members made in random that actually did help others? This seems like a can of worms that never should have been opened. This is my last reply to this issue. Take care. angel

[ComputerFix]

As ST put it, what it says under my user name can be whatever you would like it to be, just so long as Mulder doesn't pick it for me

But seriously, I have no strong opinion, but elected to keep it the same for two reasons:

1) "no opinion" doesn't seem to help you make a decision (though I think the strong majority of us will live with whatever you do, and "no opinion" certainly may apply)

2) I don't think "it's" broken, so I don't want you to have to devote time and resources to changing it.

A little different take on what others have said.....

While it doesn't really mean anything, I rather enjoyed having my title change, even if from mostly Random posts. It made me feel more a part of this "community", not just someone who dropped in, got what they needed, and left.

It may not mean much, but it was rather nice. I'm sure others may enjoy it as well, judging from the non-congradulations threads.

Angleize did hit a good suggestion.

Rather than take the time to change how posts are tallied, you could include something by which we could indicate our knowledge.

I have no problems indicating to people that I have "medium-low" tech knowledge, and it could be of benifit to those who want to "judge" individual sources.

[Brooks]

Personally, whether I or another person is a "distinguished" member or not really does not matter to me, if I get the help that I need, and I have gotten help from someone with 5 posts before on a question I had as well as people that have thousands of posts.

[pyritechips]

It's called "Random Discussion" It's as meaningful to count random "discussion" posts as it is to count the lines in the chat room. The only difference is that posts are static and chat is dynamic...

~Jim

[Davey7549]

Mike
Just a thought.......
Seems like much of the hullabaloo started when the thread listed below took off. Is it possible just to create a program to back out those posts only, close the thread, and leave the remaining numbers and procedures alone?
http://forums.techguy.org/t88435/s.html

Obviously the best solution is to distinguish between the two but that is not possible with current VB programming.

Dave