5 Posts per day limit

[Jen Reese]

Jordan:
> I think my analogy earlier was a good way to put my take on it - it
> leads to stuffing too many letters into too few envelopes without
> having much real effect on anything else. I think that maybe what
> it's trying to get across is a good thing, but it's not a good way
> to put it.

Jen: Limiting the number of posts didn't completely solve every 
problem on the list, and maybe it did create other problems such as 
the one Betsy mentioned about stopping a discussion cold or your own 
issues with threading. It's not simply a numbers game though, 
positive things happened, too: more variety of topics, more posters 
participating, newcomer's questions addressed more readily (to name 
a few).

Part of the reason you see so many threads now is because the list 
opened up more topics once the most frequent posters stepped back. 
Saitana said threads are like posters and if you don't like one, 
ignore it. That gets hard when the majority of threads every day are 
variations on the same topic. You don't see that nearly as much now. 
And the positive change can't be chalked up only to new canon, 
because here we are over a year past HBP, with fewer JKR updates, 
and thread variety continues.

Jordan:
> I think that maybe, instead of five posts per day total, maybe
> limit to some number of posts per day _on a given subject_. - and
> have some flexibility for the amount of discussion that subject is
> getting - if debate is reasonably healthy and fast-paced (and 
> _going somewhere_) go ahead and post more, but if it seems one 
> person is dominating a thread or it's just going back and forth 
> without providing any new information, that's a problem. And I 
> don't think that posts in one discussion should go towards 
> any "limit" so as to prevent from posting in an unrelated 
> discussion.

Jen: The difficultly with the first idea is subjectivity. Who will 
make that call? As Betsy so aptly put it, "one person's rehash is 
another person's nuance." I think more members would be bothered by 
someone making a judgement call in the middle of a thread than they 
are by limiting posts. At least that applies to ALL members equally 
and there can't be shouts of favoritism. 

Your second idea is more appealing to me and would also help the 
problem Betsy mentioned of discussions drying up. I have my fears 
we'd be back at square one, but if people want to consider that one 
I'm open to it.

Jen R.