Let me run some ideas past you. Possible changes to TGO.

[Guest Old goat]

works for me

[z90HD]

To me it really dont matter much as to what you want to do with the posting points as I have not paid any attention to them since I joined the forum.

What drew me to join was the good information here, which I only take as the opinions of others. I then take what I think is good intel and do more research on what I find here on the TGO forum.

Its just my opinion to leave things alone as I already like what I see.

Thanks.

[gregintenn]

Its just my opinion to leave things alone as I already like what I see.

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THIS!!!

[R1100R]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

THIS!!!

+3. You might add a ask the expert section

[D3vo]

I too am concerned the lack of rep points would be interpreted as ignorant.

[Trekbike]

I find post counts somewhat useful. If you spend about a week on the forum you can usually see who knows their stuff and who is just posting responses for the heck of it. Sometimes just looking at someone's spelling and grammar can speak volumes.

I usually try to follow the rule that if I don't have about a 85-90% certainty about a technical type question, I usually keep my mouth shut. If I'm passing out advice I want it to be somewhat credible. I think by just doing that we would increase the "expert" responses significantly and cut down on the trash.

[Jasongar8]

As far as the post count goes, it makes me more comfortable when I am buying or selling with another member. But I guess you could find this information by other search means.

The SME sounds good on paper but I'm not sure how well it would work in "real life". I think it would work very well on topics that are balck and white, such as HCP laws. But on other topics the advice that the SME gives would still be their opinion. They may have had great results from a tactic or weapon/light/holster but another expert may have not has the same results from the same weapon/light/tactic/whatever. I also have a feeling that many members would not want to publicly disagree with the SME for fear of backlash from the community. Even if they have had first hand experience with whatever item is being discussed.

The rep points haven't ever worked out very well on some other forums that I have been on. But that's not to say that they won't here.

[Smith]

After thinking about it I think the only way to do this is to simply have an "Ask the Experts" forum and have the mods be the "experts". It would translate to the rest of the forum and be something for reference without having some supermod/"expert" being the "final" authority on something that is very opinionated in general threads. The only way the first proposal would work is to have a general consensus among the "experts" and I don't see that going well. Add to it that TGO David would be the one deciding who is and who isn't an "Expert" in certain fields and that would not end well for David IMO.

Of course I'm no expert on this subject.

[TGO David]

Sounds good, ..... maybe a suggestion. Eliminate the politics section, seems to cause bad feelings and disrupts haromony among members. After all when politics and religion are eliminated from discussions , ideas are exchanged without conflict, what's the need? Really isn't this a gun forum. JMO

I'm kind of tempted to do this, actually.

Sounds good thus far. I just hope that the people that are awarded SME's don't get big heads like alot of them do on "other forums". I am sure you have seen what I am talking about on the "other forums" from time to time.

Yes, but I've also seen it implemented properly where the SME's had a ton of humility about them as well. If we couldn't pull that off here, I'd kill the idea in a hurry.

I like this site as it is. This is only my opinion. I don't want to give up my hard earned "Post Count" It's your house, your rules. Please just don't bring out the ban hammer

No fear of that. I wanted honest feedback and I'm getting some really good contributions here.

I very much like the goals, here.

All three proposals sound good but I suspect that implementing them AND keeping all three true to the intended goal is going to be difficult and require a lot of oversight; "best laid plans of Mice and Men", etc. as it's simply difficult to keep things like reputation points, etc. from not turning into or at least being perceived as some sort of popularity contest.

I'm not saying don't try; just adding a note of caution.

Again, if we implement it properly there's not much danger of it becoming a popularity contest. Still, I've got a lot of thinking to do still. I'm seeing some flaws in my plan that need to be addressed ... and even then I'm not sure any of these changes will translate into great improvements.

SME are a good idea as well --- however the implication from the initial post is that anyone not a SME is ignorant, not sure how that will play out. There is a middle ground between the expert and novice which this system does not account for. Perhaps this should be a tiered thing, rather than binary, in the long term.

I didn't mean to imply that but I can see how it may have been read that way. However there are undoubtedly clear cases in point where someone has asked a fairly serious question only to receive good advice that was lost in the noise of a lot of really bad advise.

Could always use iTrader vBulletin as a way to show a user's buy/sell/trade reputation. I've seen it used on JeepGarage Forums, but they are running vBulletin 3.8.3

I've tried implementing iTrader here again as recently as two weeks ago. It's still very, very buggy on vBulletin 4.x and I don't have much hope of it improving.

...

At any rate, I'm not going to do anything just yet. As I said I've got a lot more thinking to do.