#AAAAARGH!
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Elbow room…
…amirite?
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My last keg did get empty pretty quickly. I’d much rather blame that on virtual mutants in the lounge than my real life friends and family drinking it all!
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I think it makes perfect sense to cap the number of regualars at 1% of the active commentariat.
The proles have the VAST MAJORITY OF THE FORUM for their shenanigans.
Actually, which would be higher? 1%, or whatever metric was proposed above?
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26550 total users right now. Smaller amount are active, I guess. Are you sure you don’t want a 0.1% club?
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meh it’s mostly us kvetching about newly arrived trollies.
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FTFY
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There’s a difference?
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Just a question, but – why is this important? In the 2 years* the Lounge category has existed, there have been only 32 topics started.
* 1 year, 10 months - July, 2014
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Slacker
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Did you read the thread?
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Yes.
There still seems to me to be no reason for people to be all up in arms over the regular badge. It affords access to almost no threads, in relative comparison to the other threads available.
The only other benefit would be an increased like count.
As far as “discourages dialogue” goes – I think the discussion in here is proof positive that dialogue is encouraged when individuals want to engage in dialogue. When individuals want to game rules, they game rules. Adding more rules, or changing rules will not change individuals – only their methods of gaming.
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Well then sounds like you’ve solved everything.
but the YAMVT* is in the wrong category, I have no idea why it was started in the lounge
* yet another music video thread
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I realize this topic hasn’t been touched in three days, but I got it in the email digest just now… because I haven’t logged on to the bbs in a week or so…
I read through the whole topic though because I’ve thought about this before - I noticed that people I’ve never heard of have the regular badge, while those I know well (eg @Donald_Petersen) don’t.
Now, in part that is because I’m genuinely far less active than I used to be and I don’t know all the new regulars - fair enough.
However, those of us who have been here forever and have contributed a lot at one time or another are still “regulars” by any widely used standard, even if we aren’t literally regulars. @codinghorror stated in this thread that using any measure of regularity besides a literal one was a “non-starter” as if that is common sense - I don’t see that it is necessarily so, and I see this sentiment lurking within the comments posted by others in this topic.
I don’t want an elite group that rules the bbs, either literally with mod powers or just with strong group think and mocking of different ideas. That’s how most internet forums are, and that’s part of why every forum besides this sucks.
So I don’t actually want a regular badge for myself or for others like Donald (though he actually deserves one), if we are not literally a regular at present. A possible solution I like is slashdot’s user number - not that anyone reads slashdot anymore. On each comment, next to the username was their number (and never any other badges etc.) - the lower the number, the earlier you signed up. More than anything it was just bragging rights, but it was also useful in many cases - you knew people with relatively low numbers have been around for a while, know the in-jokes, etc.
Of course, I have a personal incentive to suggest that for here, because I am near the bottom of the user list (registered before the bbs went public) so my number would be really low. I don’t know if the old comment system data is still available but my number would be fairly low there too.
But besides that, I think it solves some of the problems discussed in this thread. If you’re someone who doesn’t really care that much, your low number is enough to feel happy about. If you do care, you can still try to maintain your regular badge, but you don’t have to feel the pressure to do so that people do now - people still know you’re not a troll because your number is relatively low. And because it’s just a number and not a description, it doesn’t bestow false authority or encourage cliqueiness as badges and titles do elsewhere - and it’s abstract enough that your brain doesn’t have much to think about (“member since [date]” is too specific). It has other benefits too but I already wrote too much.
Basically, my suggestion is to keep the metric-driven regular badge but also give a little taste of specialness to long-time users, in a way that doesn’t penalize people for taking a break.
And c’mon, people like Donald and @Mindysan33 have more than earned their regular tenure by now 
btw Michael the reason I replied to you is because I was expanding on your point that the regular badge is meaningless, except also that it isn’t meaningless. In all aspects of life, people like to be recognized for having been a part of something for a long time.
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People who have TL3 don’t have to be literal regulars, because that is an arbitrary label stuck on an arbitrary authorization. It could just add easily be called " Friends of Bill W, Dorothy and Caesar."
And then we’d be discussing the literal metrics of how friendly people are, and when the last time was that somebody had a drink, watched Wizard of Oz, or paid their Empirical taxes.
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Temporary or Recent Regular seems more accurate. Over the lifetime of the BBS it is inaccurate. But who would you trust more - somebody who has just ground through a bunch of threads, or an old-timer with a great like: post ratio (with a high number of posts: time)?
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“These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.”
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[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:86, topic:77717, full:true”]
Plus all my good GIFs are on my laptop.
[/quote]
I should have mentioned that, strictly speaking, this isn’t even my GIF. As is the case with a great deal of my favorite animated GIFs, this one is largely the work of @penguinchris the inestimably talented. All I did was supply the grape jelly.
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