Thanks for the info theymos.

I don't think that the sheer number of posts that someone makes is a good indicator of their contribution. There are a large number of "me too" and uninformative posts which make the forum less rewarding to follow. There was already an incentive to post indiscriminately via the "Newbie", "Junior Member", "Full Member" thing and this will just make it worse as people race to make 250 posts.

Others have similar concerns.

Gavin was throwing around the idea of switching to a mailing list, presumably because he too was having similar problems with the forum.
I was not particularly keen on a mailing list at that point but I'm much more equivocal now.

The value of ratings depends greatly on who's doing the rating. Given the fact that ratings are taken fairly seriously nowadays (seriously enough to exclude a large proportion of users from changing them), it needs to be more nuanced and transparent. It's at an unhappy half-way stage at the moment.

Is it Sirius who makes these forum decisions? Sirius alone or an ad-hoc committee?

ByteCoin