I tend to notice whether the username is one I know or not.
Those user names that I know could be divided into three categories:
–Regs
–Newbies with postorrhea
–People who may not be regs, but who I have taken note of for one reason or another. This is not always a positive thing.
I wouldn’t bother to look at the post counts of any of the above because I “know them” already.
If it’s a user name I don’t know, I’ll usually look at the post count and location as a way of gaining information about them. Unfortunately, since we now have “guests,” we can’t easily see their info. But the fact that they’ve been here less than a month is useful information in and of itself.
But I’d never judge a post or a poster on their post count. They’re either contributing positively to the dialogue here or they’re not.
Actually, she almost made me seize, and then, I laughed out loud. Diogenes, Liberal, and FaerieBeth? I wouldn’t have felt more out of place if I had been photoshopped into a picture with the Pope and President!
Given my pathetic post count, I hope the short answer to the question posed is : not very.
As to your newbie status, at the rate I’m currently posting, I predict you’ll overtake me, for instance, within a week or two. I don’t expect you to be particularly gratified by that though.
Consult charts such as this every time you need one of these characters.
Unless you have a Mac, in which case this changes a little.
As to the OP, I more or less totally discount postcounts, except when someone’s first few posts have detailed information about long-standing grudges &c., which makes me suspect a little socking going on. Or if there are 4 or 5 posts and most of them are like “d00d, yuo know \x/hat is teh kewl?” or some other nonsense. To me, content is most important of all – it’s the only way any of us know each other around here.
I just use this path from the start menu in Windows:
Start --> All Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Character Map
There is a similar route for the Map, but I’m on a Win XP system right now, in Classic View.
Bambi has an amazing brain that is apparently quite good at storing language oriented stuff, so his way works best for him. I’m never going to remember ALT - keystroke - anything, so my way works best for me. Of course once a “special character” has been used you can just copy+paste it, like anything else.
Or you could just memorize the characters in the languages you use. I just speak French and German, so I don’t have any use for a lot of the ones you just posted.
(Bambi’s hot and language-oriented? How did I never notice the language aspect?)
You two might make a cute couple… hmm. He seems to be very gifted vis-a-vis languages. I know he’s been studying Spanish and soaking it up like a sponge.
Both my posts and my free membership were lost in the Winter, et al. i had to sign back up. I’ve been posting since at least 2002; I remember being comforted by the kindness of board members when an in-law was killed the night before Thanksgiving that year and the family decided to hold dinner at dead in-law’s house as had been planned. That being a weird happening, I naturally turned to the SDMB for thoughts and remarks.
I look at the post count when I don’t recognize someone’s name. Post count/year have never stopped me from reading a post or considering its value.
I don’t know whether it’s general shyness or what, but I don’t tend to post unless I have a question or unless I know the answer to someone else’s question, or have something that I feel adds value to the conversation. Usually by the time I finish reading a thread (I won’t post unless I have read the entire thread, it seems rude to do otherwise*) someone else has said pretty much what I was going to say, so I don’t bother to post.
*Of course I have been thoroughly cowed by posting at TWoP for several years.
Below is a sampling that I think represents how most of you feel about the importance of post-count:
Then there were the answers dripping with facetiousness that get honorable mention here just for making me smile:
So, if post-counts aren’t that important; and if it’s true that, as Honey said, “quality is much more important here than quantity”, why would the mods feel compelled to post a sticky thread in MPSIMS that forbids the creation of threads that exist for no other purpose than to “pad” post-counts?
Post-count must matter to someone or The Powers That Be wouldn’t have to request that we refrain from artifically augmenting them.
Some '99ers, like myself, vascillate between courting the bemused affections of the Teeming Millions and eliciting such vitriol as to encourage devout pacifists to gore out my entrails with a grapefruit spoon and cook them in a bed of charcoals made from goat dung.
Then again, maybe that’s just me.
Seriously, I try not to pay attention to post count. It smacks of serious elitism. Why should it matter of someone has a post count of 83, when their post of the moment is an excellent contribution to the thread of the moment. Isn’t that how we are judged? Both by individual contributions and a slow accumulation of contributions? The fact that someone has a low post count and so has only advanced along one of those two paths doesn’t mean a thing to me.
After all, a newbie here may be an old salt on another message board. Aside from people who are new to message boards in general ( and who don’t take advise to go and visit ATMB ), I don’t really bother with whether someone’s a newbie or not.
If I notice a very low ( like, their first or second or fifth ) count, I’ll extend an SDMB Welcome to 'em. Cause, we’re nothing if not friendly.
I generally only pay attention to post counts if someone says something really stupid or really brilliant. Then, it’s not the post count alone as it is the post count and the join date considered together. If someone says something stupid, they have a recent join date and three times the amount of posts I do, I get suspicious. If they’re new and say something brilliant, I think, “Welcome to the team!”
That said, I wonder how people can find the time to make 20,000+ posts.
There have been people impressed with (their own) post counts in the past at the same time that the hamsters had a problem keeping the board wheel spinning. Post-padding was outlawed to reduce the wear and tear on the hamster wheel by people who really should not have been so impressed with the notion that the “Submit” button confers anything on a poster beyond a willingness to see their name on the upper left of a post.
I was actually kind of sad when my post-count went past 999. For whatever reason, people with low post counts impress me. There is something about the hope that you might start a revolution or die gloriously in the heat of battle before you get more than 3 digits next to your name in the same way it is entertaining for society to have little cute child prodigies regardless of if they grow up to do smack. Once in their life they were young and talented until they were assimilated and dull and hacks.
But really, what the other posters said: post counts mean nothing. Bollocks, if it wasn’t for this thread I probably wouldn’t of been aware of some of the previous poster’s post counts. Post counts are half as lustorious and twice as worthless as bling.
