What Happened to Nightfall's Post Count?

[LightPhoenix]

I agree with everyone who has said to get rid of post count, and this is why:

Firstly, there's the inevitable problem of people posting just to increase their post count. There will always be meaningless posting, and inevitably there will be people that will post a lot of garbage. However, displaying a post count provides one more excuse for that.

Second, I don't think post count serves any real utility. It's not an accurate gauge of... well, anything escept for who is a prolific poster and who isn't. That is readily obvious once you spend a little time on the boards.

Third, I think that it diminishes the impact that less prolific board members have. In part because posts are drowned out, so to speak, but more because people will naturally pay more attention to the people who have a higher post count. However, I feel that in many cases everyone has something worthwhile to say, and that can tend to be masked by post count (aka the "newb" syndrome"). I think that it's less an impact here, because our hobby is older than the internet, and I think we probably skew higher age-wise than the average message board posters.

Fourth, I don't really think it adds anything to the boards to balance out what it subtracts.

For the same general reasons, I'm all for masking the join date as well, though I think that's less of an issue.

 

[Nifft]

Third, I think that it diminishes the impact that less prolific board members have. In part because posts are drowned out, so to speak, but more because people will naturally pay more attention to the people who have a higher post count.

Whatever man. Piratecat likes it, and he's worth 5.53 of you.

Feh, -- N

 

[Piratecat]

To give credit where credit is due, I'm alternatively worth 2.099 Niffts but only a fraction of a Crothian - so you may want to take anything he or I say with a grain of salt.


Seriously, I don't particularly care about post count one way or another, but we have no plans - or real reason - to dump it entirely.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Either Nightfall got caught tilting the board ... or he ran up a high score and flipped the counter. I suspect the former.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Fourth, I don't really think it adds anything to the boards to balance out what it subtracts.

It is generally a useful guage in PbP of whether or not a poster might vanish in the middle of the game. I like to have it around for that purpose.

 

[Dog Moon]

I like postcount because I enjoy posting on the threads where someone is like 'yay, reached 5k posts'. It's like a mini celebration of sorts and makes me happy.

And sometimes it's fun talking about it. Like now.

And wasn't there a time when the postcount was like 'Your postcount is Crothian's minus x'? or something like that. Was funny. Or when Spoony gave himself a postcount of like 400k temporarily.

 

[LightPhoenix]

It is generally a useful guage in PbP of whether or not a poster might vanish in the middle of the game. I like to have it around for that purpose.

Good point. I don't play PbP, so I didn't think of that.

 

[Nightfall]

If anyone cares, I'm back and I'm ready to answer IN PRIVATE via email or PM any questions you have about...stuff.

 

[jonesy]

...people will naturally pay more attention to the people who have a higher post count...

I somewhat doubt that. And the same goes for join date. The only thing they provide is a rough estimate of how long someone has been visiting the forum. And that doesn't really say anything about them.

Personally I pay more attention to people who make interesting posts.

Hmm. The only way to make postcount any sort of indicator of how "valuable" someone is would be to have people rank posts. But that would be horribly elitist and much more vulnerable to misuse. "I don't like that guy, so I'm going to rank every post he's made a 1 even though he makes good points". "And that one I consider a friend so he gets a 5 everytime even when it's just useless drivel."

And no matter which system you use someone is always going think it's the wrong one.

 

[Nightfall]

Yeah which is why I prefer people rank me without that kind of a system.