The whole point of “regular”, is that they are literally a regular. They do these things regularly. Hitting a magical number once, then walking away for six months is the exact opposite of that, but would be allowed under your proposal. That’s a non-starter.
In the same way that highly controversial topics are clearly different beasts, so are chat topics. By that I mean any topic which generates hundreds of “replies” in a day, or some super high number. There are plenty of games category topics that are perfectly valid discussions.
It strikes me that this is a safety issue as I’ve noted before about motorcycles, but is also true in the context of discussion:
Different speeds are themselves fine. I am not advocating for the end of chat topics. It’s the mixing of the different speeds of discussion that’s the root of the problem…
Hmm. How about reading [insert percentage] of the posts in [time period] in topics that the person has read in that time period? That would allow people like me, who avoid the Games threads, to not have that avoidance count against us, but still have it counted towards those who do participate in those threads (and completely excludes the “lounge” posts for those who don’t have access to then).
And, since there’s a minimum number of threads you have to open in that same time period to get Regular status, you can’t exploit it just by reading all of the posts in a few threads. Then it just becomes a matter of tweaking the numbers to everyone’s satisfaction.
How would you measure that, though? Likes received? Ratio of posts to flags received? % of replies replied to?
Computers are good at measuring quantitative things like “% of total messages read.” They’re not so good at qualitative things like “kind interaction.”
I’m more troubled by my 8 Day Read Time. I love goofing off here as much as the next worker bee, but I do like to flatter myself that I have some worth ethic
ETA: Okay, a quick back of the envelope calculation shows I average about eleven minutes a day reading BB. Though a bit of a relief, I know that’s not right. While my usual pattern is to participate for a year or two and then lurk for two or three, I don’t stop reading.
Thought forming…I only log in when have something to post, then I log out and nuke the cookies from orbit. Shit, I’ve averaged eleven minutes a day posting for the past three years! I don’t even want to know my real read time. I have a problem…
I thought you might use it for “ammo” that way. What if I countered that since the staff announced they’d be increasing output, and it’s gotten to the point that duplicate topics are common that the load has become kind of silly? I know that’s completely outside your domain, but I don’t think yours is the only argument for why reading is a “hassle”.
