An open letter to our esteemed OLO founder and moderator...

Graham, can I please request that we be able to post four times in 24 hours on the article threads.

It is good to see articles that are right up to date with current affairs, such as today’s piece by Chris Lewis; ‘Abbott draws his Battlelines’.

I have found it extremely frustrating, especially with articles like this one and just generally with the articles section of this forum, that posters can only put up two comments while the subject is hot to trot!

I don’t understand why we can put up four posts on general threads and two on the article threads.

It seems that an imbalance has developed, with the general threads being considerably more popular. The best way to address this seems to me to be to allow four posts per day in response to articles.

I also feel that the authors that contribute articles would feel that it is more worthwhile if they received more comments. This would pervade into more success for OLO overall, which would in turn bring more people into the fray.

It is a shame that a lot of the articles get very few comments. I think that any means of encouraging more comments would be a good thing.

Yes I know we’ve discussed this before. But that’s the nature of forums like this – that things get revisited and re-mulled over!

What do other posters reckon?

I don't get why there's a limit on commenting at all. Kills a conversation.

I'm very happy with the posting limit. We all want our say, but not everyone can post regularly. The limits mean that OLO isn't overrun by retirees and schizophrenics on disability pensions who have lots of free time.

That's the same reason the text is so bland. Can you imagine what this place would look like if posters could change the size, font and colour of the text? I get seizures just thinking about it.

Sancho, I’m proposing a small increase in posting freedom on this forum. Not something that would allow “retirees and schizophrenics” to run amok!

I appreciate the need for restrictions.

“Can you imagine what this place would look like if posters could change the size, font and colour of the text?”

I think that it would improve OLO considerably if we could use italics, bold text, different font styles, sizes and colours and even emoticons, etc.

The discipline of cutting one's thoughts to 350 words can stem windiness. Some posters run on until they have about 350 words of repetitious blather. Others organise their thoughts, direct comments to several other people in the same post. Taking off the restrictions will likely increase the number of posts from the former. That would decrease the quality of olo.

There are two views on this, both with merit.

On the one hand the cap forces people to write more, without some cap, some threads would be in danger of being over-run by a few people who seem to have too much time on their hands, but on the other hand, even with people who want to write prolifically about something, that would really only be annoying if they have nothing intelligent to say.

My view is there should be a cap, but it should be more generous than at present. The majority may disagree, but then the majority of OLO viewers don't write much at all.

A few thoughts/points/ideas:

Whatever cap is set, should be increased for threads as they get older. There is often a flurry of posts shortly after an article is published or a general thread started, but usually within a couple of days there are only a few posters left who are in practice trying to have a conversation of sorts. Whilst a low cap seems sensible whilst there are numerous people trying to post, when there are only a handful of likely posters left, the cap becomes really annoying, and not just for the people trying to post. Often it is annoying for the people awaiting a response. My suggestion is that the cap of two posts be kept for the two days following an articles population, then it should be increased to 4 per day for the next 5 days and then lifted to 6 or 8 thereafter.. perhaps the revised cap could be determined by reference to the recent activity).

<continued in my next post>