Thanks for all your comments . . . especially you Una, for sharing your expertise.
We’ve tended to leave the post count thing alone, except to discourage inordinate attention. As I have said before and will doubtless say again, we live for the day when someone is judged not by the number but the quality of their posts.
boy the hamsters are weird. When I went to bed t-keela had posted once but never replied to my second post before Kal posted. Now there’s a post there in between.
Anyway I got to thinking more about your voting idea and decided even if we made it workable wouldn’t having dozens to thousands of people voting on individual posts hammer the servers into non-existence?
A ranking system that has come up would be useful once the post whores got up to the top level but that might just encourage newbies to spam until they got to the top level as well. I know I’d be far more tempted by a rank then just watching a number go up.
Course maybe I’m just thinking that b/c I like my idea the best.
To: Una Persson I’m glad you acknowledge that it would sunder the community b/c I know I’d hardly bother posting anymore. The humor of the pit, and the community of MPSIMS is one of the main reasons I check this place so often. It adds a lot of humanity/humor to the boards that would be lacking in a huge ‘great debates’ forum. If this place was always intended for the intellectual elite to have an endless creationist vs evolution debate that’d be fine but it’d be a shame…a damn shame.
I think having a ranking system is ludicrous. I’ve been around here for years and read many many threads, but I just don’t post that often. Am I still a rookie?
Not as far as I’m concerned, USCDiver. Generally, when I look under a person’s name, I’ve trained my eyes to sweep up from “Posts” to “Registered” so I have a good adea about how long somebody has been around and how prolific a poster they are. That’s all it really means to me.
There are some standouts, like Q.E.D., who came along and rocketed ahead in the number of posts he makes, but his poets are pretty much always well thought-out and up to snuff.
I thought about getting rid of post counts on my board, but users would probably protest.
vBulletin can’t freeze post counts at a certain number, without some heavy modding.
Special user titles based on a certain post count add table queries, causing the hamsters to work a bit harder.
If there was a special “paying users only” section, posts that would probably go into another subforum would end up there. Nonpaying users would be less likely to experience the wisdom and wit of experienced users.
Karma hacks slow boards down; they’d work for smaller sites, but not something with SDMB-like traffic.