Lenitus, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Sorry if I wasn’t clear that I was recommending downloading as a technique for saving PMs. I also get them via email, but don’t save all of those. Gmail has virtually unlimited storage.
Hi sabaray…my mistake. I read “it is” as “is it”, even though you didn’t have a question mark at the end. I think I need to increase my font size!
Roger is a pushover. He doubled the mail box size.
Lol-- I definitely didn’t understand this system. I would like comments, but never leave a comment. I was a lonely one green bar girl and one morning I woke up and there were three green bars. I had no idea why. But secretly, I was kind-of happy. The bars did not influence my future comments or change how I read other people’s comments. I agree with someone above about knowing who the consistently helpful folks are. One thing that I do think would be useful would be a thread about the “best” threads of all time in the parent cafe. For example, I followed Sunrise’s posts for a long time. Someone mentioned that they hoped she would meet another poster --Latetoschool–who had died in heaven. I then searched that poster, and read an amazing and sad thread about a woman suffering from lung cancer and the support she received and her interesting perspectives. So, an all time greatest threads list would be helpful.
I was wondering how I had 51 messages! I was so confused lol.
Ty, mods 
Hey, Roger-- Thanks!!
My two cents
Possibility one: Make the total reputation a person can give be based on his number of posts/word count contributed. This way, it would be harder to game the system.
Possibility two: As others have mentioned, make posts rather than users likable.
Thanks for the input, “bubbles”!
After decades spent on different bulletin boards I’ve seen lots of way to do it. One of my favorite boards is a railroad industry board called yardlimits.com. (son is a RR employee). I like their graphically designed quote and multi-quote buttons and really like their “Thanks” button - similar to liking a post, you thank them for their contribution.
<a href=“http://www.yardlimits.com/forums/images/styles/yardlimits/buttons/post_thanks.gif[/url]”>http://www.yardlimits.com/forums/images/styles/yardlimits/buttons/post_thanks.gif</a>
![http://www.yardlimits.com/forums/images/styles/yardlimits/buttons/post_thanks.gif[/url]](http://www.yardlimits.com/forums/images/styles/yardlimits/buttons/post_thanks.gif%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
The number of thanks a poster has received is listed on each of their posts. That “reputation” part is not what I think is most important though. It’s the posts with lots of thanks attached I pay most attention to. A very popular post will have multiple “thanks” associated with it - lending more creedence to that information.