Well, I would support it. Right now it's only mods who do not need their posts approved, but this could work for more established members (and by established, I mean 500 + posts that are not trollish in nature). But you will have to be aware that posts could still be deleted by mods if they're not up to the quality that is expected in the Journal section. Like trolling or just plain pointless posts.

However, I would keep the post approval function for the Spill Your Guts because things can get quite heated in there, and I can't imagine what would happen in there if we weren't screening posts.

But this is an administrative function that would have to be changed, and we all know how most of our requests go over.

The bolded would be easy to control anyway, as the owner of the journal would be one of the first to notice an offensive post and could easily ask a mod for it to be deleted, but as said if each member that beats the 'mod approval' for the a journal post has more than 500 posts, then the chances of him/her posting something that shouldn't be there are quite remote anyway.

I don't think anybody would argue with this, as these are quite heated areas of the forum.

BTW where is Urban I haven't seen him around the forum in a while, is he on holiday or something?

Thanks for replying BD. I'd certainly expect anything not up to the high quality expected to be deleted, though I'd be a little smug (rather than a little Smaug, LOTR fans, right?) ;) and say that I doubt any of the posts in my journal would qualify for deletion. Well, they couldn't really, could they, as then they would never have been approved in the first place. In fact, this would go for just about every journal, as it's not just a place to post stuff, but as time goes on I personally feel --- and I'd imagine it's the same for most of us --- that this becomes your "showcase" to the forum: look at what I can do, to an extent, and you don't want to have anything there that's not up to scratch. I know I edit and re-edit my posts before submitting them, as sometimes the flow that seemed ok when I was writing an article just doesn't work when I read it back.

It would be great to have our journals free of approval for posting, though as you say it's a petition to the gods on high, and they seldom if ever return any calls. I think if it was implemented then 99% of journal writers here would write more, as they'd be able to just post and then go on with the next one, rather than, as I explained before, certainly in my case, submit, wait, get approval then submit another, so as not to bombard mods with requests.