Forcing people to look at the profile to get the post count is not the best idea. Every single time someone wants to see a post count, they’ll do the “view profile” function, which still does that outrageous Table-locking thing to find the “last post” which it displays as well. Which can greatly slow the Board down at times.
The actual recording and display of the post count requires only an extremely small amount of extra effort by the server. Some things which more effort include:
- Searching
- “View New Posts”
- E-mail notification
- Sig lookups
And removing the post count display requires a template change…you should know by now what the answer is to the SDMB doing that.
You know what would be a real way to stop the mindless post count inflation? Just remove the MPSIMS, IMHO, and Pit forums. With few exceptions, posting mindless and meaningless posts to raise ones count isn’t such an issue in the other forums.
But then, of course, in doing that you take a big step from turning a “Board Community” into a “Board”, and that would make a radical change that would destroy the SDMB as we know it.
So what else do you do? How about shunning those people who do nothing but make mindless drive-by posts? Especially the “vanity” ones (“Did someone call?”). How about telling them off in the Pit? Mass use of “Ignore”? All of these (excepting Ignore) are highly negative behaviours, which would only decrease the value of the Board. Unless they drove away the people with thousands upon thousands of mindless posts, of course.
Sometimes people speculate about how great it would be if the SDMB “got back to its roots” of GQ and the Comments on Cecils Columns and Staff Reports. I hang around in GQ more than anywhere else, and know a lot of the frequent GQ people off-board, and I do hear this spoken of more and more frequently. I don’t think there’s a good solution, as like I said earlier getting back to the “roots” would sunder the community. I think much of those comments are more driven by resentment of the times when one can honestly try for days to make a post in GQ - and if somehow the Board was fast overall, there would not be such a schism.
However, there are two “positive” solutions that I see. They take effort and can’t work right now, but in the future they could be interesting.
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Have the post count under the profile bring up the post count on a framed page that includes a page from an advertiser that pays the Reader for each click-through. So, by definition, each checking of the post count would count as a “visit” and generate revenue.
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If a two-tiered system is ever set up for paying Membership, it could be made visible only to paying Members.
Just two possibilities, for the future.
