One day, I’m gonna look back at my early stuff and think “damn, I wish it showed what my post count was at the time of posting – as well as the current count… Sad, sad, sad.”
…well, maybe not in those words. And definitely not as clunkily.
Such a thing would probably call for hacking the vB. Since hacking the vB expires the warranty or somesuch, the admins prefer having a warranty over having something fit the convenience of a few people, so hacking the vb to get you what you want will be unlikely.
Dig.
Do you like Turkish Delight?
Not really. Lions don’t digest chocolate too well 
So post what your post count is now here, and that will at least be a record for what it was on June 8, 2003 – from that, you can probably make a decent estimate a month or two in either direction. (For future reference, I see Mr. B at 221 now, Aslan2 at 817, and myself at 1206.)
No hijack intended, but man, that is such a great book! It should be required reading for every little smoosher in the whole school system, from sea to shining sea.
But don’t you yourself look back on old posts and think how you’ve changed? I think it’s a shame that little moment in time isn’t obvious. Besides, it twists the context, in some ways.
I would have thought the passage of time, as much as post count, would be a marker for how we develop as posters around here. Each post has a unique timestamp. Wouldn’t that do?
(And yes, the Narnia Chronicles remain utterly cool. Still own my set from nearly 30 years ago. Always smile when I see your nick turn up because of that, Aslan2.) 
Thank you.
“Hacking the vB” does NOT expire any warranty. It only makes it more difficult for their technical support to help you if and when you report a problem, and it makes it more difficult (sometimes much more difficult) to apply the numerous point-releases that the vBulletin people do.
Go to the vBulletin site and read their support forums - it’s likely that more than half of all installations sold have been “hacked” in some manner.
It might be a pretty major hack, since the post count is not stored along with the actual post, but grabbed from the user data on the fly when the display is put together. So saving the current post count with the post would require redefining the SQL post database structure to add another field, for starters.
Something the vB crew could do pretty easily, but not rewarding enuf for the SDMB techs.
Not a major hack at all. I could do it in an hour. It’s only a matter of a small modification the the SQL database, and changing where the software looks for poscount when it displays a thread listing. Even so, it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. When the board was new was the time to do that, but now, it’s kind of pointless, at least for older posters.
Do you have a vBulletin board of your own or own the software?
No, but I’ve worked on tForum, which is another PHP/MySQL-based forum software package, so I have a pretty good idea how these things are done.
I’ve wondered why you often seem to speak from authority on this subject. I feel that it’s inaccurate to cast some tasks in vBulletin as being very simple, if for no other reasons than the security issues that are pervasive throughout their code, and the problems of updates and point-releases, including template and php updating.
In other words, I’m not doubting or casting aspersions on your abilities in any manner, but I’m saying maybe a look into the mechanics of vBulletin might show that some things which should be simple to visualize are in fact not that simple to implement. That’s all.
You ought to try vBulletin out sometime. It’s a good product.
Turkish delight contains no chocolate.
What was that OP again? Oh, yeah. That would be nice.
D’oh.
Honestly, I wouldn’t understand the point of a post count that didn’t have current numbers. For the author of the post, sure, it’s nice and fun to look back at their 666th or 1000th posts. But for everyone else, particularly the mods and admins, it would be pretty pointless. When I look at a poster’s post count, I do it because I want to know how many total posts that person has made. I don’t look at it to see what number post of theirs that particular post is. I imagine it’s the same for everyone else.
No, I don’t think the total count should go away, I just think it would be nice to have the additional information of where that poster was in the grand scheme of SDMB.
What happened to Aslan and Aslan1?
Aslan2’s the second coming. Isn’t it obvious?
I did wonder if adding post count would add much work to the database. But it’d only be adding a couple of bytes, and require any linking or anything. Though every little helps.
It would be nice to see which post was which in contexts like ‘Damn, missed my 2000th’ or ‘Every post ObviousTroll made has been…’