I'd like to see a contributors professional title i.e. Dr,Prof., Eng., Bc CBureaucrat), St (student), Ue (unemployed), Tp (Tradesperson) , Se (selfemployed), Ps (Public servant), Jo (Journo), Ns (Nurse) etc.
I think that this would give us all a clearer picture re our varying opinions. It could also be useful for a survey re the attitudes of revenue makers & revenue takers.

Bronwyn: "Just made a quick revisit to the '05 thread and I see you've either changed your name or you didn't actually contribute."

I wasn't here then. I found the site after doing one of Graham's polls and trying to see the results. Even then it took a while to cotton on the site wasn't about polls. In my defence it has a lot of dusty, unused pages and it took a while to find where the action was.

yvonne, the link to the 2005 Christmas poll article. You can't get to it via the articles index page because it crashes.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3901

Ludwig: "At least 50% of the time there just has to be some piffling but totally enraging little cock-up."

I can't put 200 coherent words either, as the phrase "As one stage" in my opening post illustrates. This often makes me cringe, but I rationalise it as truth in advertising. By now everyone here must know there is an addled mind behind these words. Still no one has ever ribbed me about it, and I say that proves OLO's inhabitants are all softies at heart.

individual: "I'd like to see a contributors professional title ..."

How useful would that be given they can lie about it? Still, I think I would like to be able to put a bio on my user page. If ScienceLaw had of done that it would of spared me the embarrassment of calling her a bloke. The trouble is the feature isn't is simple as it sounds. You would have to monitor them for SPAM, and defamatory statements and so on. It would create work for Graham and presumably he would have to pay someone to write the software.

The [deleted comment because] thingy also isn't as easy as it sounds. I suspect a lot of the deleted comments are SPAM, and leaving them there would detract from the site. So they would have to be moved to another page or something, which also involves more software. Still transparency is a hobby horse of mine, so I say he should spend the money.

Yes, yes Ludwig. It would be great if you could have some minutes to 'retrieve' your post.

Wouldn't we all look so smooth then. Still, even after half an hour when I'm passionate about something I probably still wouldn't see my mistakes.

I wouldn't be interested at all in titles. I've seen some professors babble away and seen supposedly 'ordinary' people put together a well thought out coherent argument.

Isn't it interesting when you mistake somebody for the other gender? Why would you think that person male or female?

Truth is I've toyed with the idea of having a blokey posters name. Just to see if I get different reactions. How does Bruce sound?

Thanks for the link rstuart.

Ludwig

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!!

I don’t believe it. I DO NOT BELIEVE IT !! !! !!

Week instead OF weak!"

I received an email not long ago where you had to count the number of F's in a given sentence. I carefully counted them a couple of times to be sure, but to my annoyance I was still three short. Apparently my response was perfectly normal though, because nobody reads the word 'of' and there were three 'of's in the sentence.

So I hope I'm not adding to your angst, but you've just beaten yourself up over something that nobody would have noticed anyway!

If it really gets to you, you can always paste to Word and do a spell and grammar check first. That way too you have a back up copy in case the gremlins get to your post, as was happening a while back.

Individual

"I'd like to see a contributors professional title i.e. Dr,Prof., Eng., Bc CBureaucrat), St (student), Ue (unemployed), Tp (Tradesperson) , Se (selfemployed), Ps (Public servant), Jo (Journo), Ns (Nurse) etc."

No, no, no, and a thousand no's! Part of OLO's appeal for me is its egalitarian nature and this would destroy it completely. Besides which I think arguments should stand or fall on their own merit and not have to be propped up through people having letters after their names. Conversely, I don't think people should have to risk having their views downgraded because they don't have qualifications or whatever.

Yvonne

"Truth is I've toyed with the idea of having a blokey posters name. Just to see if I get different reactions."

Yes, I've sometimes wondered too if a blokey sounding pseudonym would invoke different responses, especially when I've been on the receiving end of some patronizing comments, as I have a few times. Then again, I think my writing style and many of my arguments have female written all over them, so it would probably be pretty pointless pretending. Besides which I would have a very hard time sounding masculine, or even neutral, on a gender related thread!

Bronwyn I always do spelling and grammar checks, even if the post is a brief one-liner. But a lot of crappy little errors just don’t get picked up.

Yair I shouldn’t worry about it. The message is nearly always perfectly clear to the reader anyway. And if I think it isn’t, all I need to do is stick up another post to clarify it.

But nonetheless, it is highly irksome to see kindergarten-level errors in a post that I have spent a lot of time researching, composing and revising. It would be great if we had the opportunity to fix them.

Bronywn, totally agree about the professional title thing. There are probably places out there where the professionals in a field can argue the point ignoring others. On this place for the most part it's about what someone says (and for many a perception of where they are coming from based on past post history).

I'd like to see a recognition of deleted comments but think explainations could be both an unnecessary workload and a potential minefield. I'd hate to see deletions become subject to never ending discussion from those who did not agree. Over a number of years on the site I've not seen any evidence of editorial tampering to change the flow of an on topic discussion but I have seen deletions which might be difficult to explain in a few words. Where it really has looked like an editorial judgement call.

I've used the recommend deletion button at times to draw attention to a post not necessarily thinking it should be deleted but where I think the site owner needs the opportunity to review.

I'll for the most part check back on threads that I've posted on. A follow up comment is not necessarily a response to my obviously worthty contributions so I don't want to get an email telling me that someone has posted to a thread.

If changes were to be made then it would be great to have settings against my profile. My default page of choice is the General comments, 5 discussions per category, created in the last quarter and sorted by last post (if I had a choice then I don't care when the discussion was started). I'd love to have the site know that unless I specified other criteria then that's how I wanted my page. Some of those settings just don't see to stick under my windows security settings or between PC's.

Part 1

R0bert