[fChk]

A valid point. Perhaps the script that counts/scores the posts could be made to sort through this information as well. If it were, there would be a possibility to create a minimum credit_point over post_amount for a post to be credited, encouraging better posting over time. Of course it'd have to be set up to not count posts in off-topic areas.

Glad you've picked up on that quote of mine :-) Which will allow me to expand a bit on the why a ratio of that kind is critical -if anything- just to avoid trashing this P4V service. I've already made this point in 'Uses of Credits':
https://post4vps.com/Thread-PENDING-Uses...8#pid36318
https://post4vps.com/Thread-PENDING-Uses...8#pid36438

It's in the nature of human-beings to 'trash' free stuff (or anything that's too easy to get.) It's a fact! P4V forum was standing on the shoulders of less than a handful of contributers; most prominently, of course, Hidden_Refuge with his beginners tutorials and overall presence to animate the forum.

I've noticed when I came back this fall that he's starting to drift away from this community which is bad news for the forum, unless hosted members step up their efforts and contribute more to fill that huge void; and it won't be done by doing business as usual (2/3 liners posts commenting on other peoples comment to OP.)

As I previously stated: content is king; without it SEO won't help much. What this forum needs is content generators which may trigger further discussions and so on in an upward spiral (generating more forum activity, more traffic, more sponsors exposure and potentially more positive fallout for the service as a whole.) The quality content will get indexed and search engines will send you the AdHoc audience looking for it without needing any SEO optimization gimmickry.

Obviously it's the owner's decision and all we can do here is sounding the alarm and giving few pointers. Mine is to point at the forum's content and as a content generator, I can only advice once again (and for the last time) for the introduction of the ratio credit_points over total_posts and at least set a value of 3 or 3.5 or 4 to remain a VPS holder (even higher for high spec VPSs.)

The idea here is to 'motivate' the most reluctant members into sharing their time/expertise (if any) and in a meaningful way with the rest of the community, or lose their VPS.

The downside of this is that it may discourage some people from trying to post here: particularly persons that aren't very strong in English and may feel insecure about making a long post with deep explanations. As a note I'd like to add that I appreciate very much the non-native English speakers that post here. Your task is double difficult: not only do you have to make quality posts, you have to do it in a language in which you aren't completely comfortable. Cheers to those that make the effort through the struggle.

I would agree with you if it were for any other language than the English language.

As things stand, the English language is the World's lingua-franca of the day (yesterday, it was French, before it was Spanish, before it was Arabic, before it was Latin and so on and so forth.) Thus we should look at this as an opportunity to master the World lingua-franca among an international audience.

Again, my 2 cents! :-)