Remove Post Count

[BigBear]

Should a total post count be calculated?

Access to User Lounge and VIP lounge granted after years of membership say 1 year for User Lounge and 2 years for VIP Lounge.

Removing a total post count would eliminate posting for the sake of raising post count and gaining bits which seem to be important to newer members.

Saving post count could result in post count being displayed after say 6 months of being a member.

All the while being able to browse your posts.

Alternatively topics moved to off topic or considered spam could have a negative effect on bits and posts

[DtY]

There should't be access to the private forums based on account age, I don't know how many sites I've signed up to, and only start using months, and years in a few cases later.

I don't see too much spam around here, and I don't think that displaying post count contributes to it.

[SNIPERDUDE]

Year-based lounge access does sound like a good thought. The actual numbers are debatable.

[[Gandalf]]

The problem with spam isn't that it increases users post count undeservedly, but that it clutters up useful forums. If it were completely up to me, I'd crush all spammers with an iron ban hammer, or perhaps just lower the warn count required for a user to get temp banned.

[Zren]

The private forums aren't exactly very active, seeing as how VIP's last post was from June... So I don't think we/they're missing much. Then again, the topic's titled 'breaking stuff'.

Personally, when you think VIP. You think invite only. With User (as in User's Lounge), it's somewhere for people who frequently are active in the site (aka post). The User's Lounge is fine since most people have 125 posts. Though if I were to do anything, I'd make a invite system like google's for new stuff, for the VIP Lounge. Though that'd require coding a new feature, and the possible begging for invites like you see for Wave etc.

Though this whole spammer complex you guys apparently are seeing that I don't. It's not really the forums really, it's more likely the ranks. No one on the internet reeeeeeeally likes to be called a newb.

[DemonWasp]

Ideally, access to the VIP lounge would be based on rate of helpful, contributing content. It's very difficult for a computer to judge content accurately (post volume is awful, post rate similarly stupid, post size is a red herring, and other metrics are pretty independent of how helpful / informative the post was). Even gauging usefulness by the frequency of replies isn't particularly useful because replies can be counterpoints, corrections, arguments, and generally counter-indicative of the value of the post.

It might be possible to move to a system based on a user's karma, but that could also lead to abuse of the karma system (miraculously unmolested thus far).

A system something like what Reddit or Digg uses (per-post "karma") can result in a strong knowledge economy, or it can result in a disaster of name-recognition, humour and groupthink trumping information (see karmanaut). A system like Slashdot's requires heavy moderator input to rate posts both on a scale of 1-5 and a type of value - funny, informative, insightful, etc.

In any case, the VIP lounge is a little far-fetched at 1000 posts. As far as I can tell, there's about 5-10 regular users who have that number of posts. I post pretty frequently, but I've also been here for almost 2 years now and I'm still not at 1000 posts (my total of ~930 posts is about 1.25 posts per day on average).

What I see as the bigger problem is that the VIP lounge (and the User Lounge...) doesn't seem to have any specific purpose. You can have discussions among the more frequent users of the site, but that doesn't imply any special level of knowledge, expertise, or interest. There's no agreed-upon topic of conversation, unlike the language-based forums.

Instead of removing post count, I'd like to be able to add filters so I can cut out some of the noise on this site. In particular, I'd like to filter out any posts started or contributed to primarily by some subset of users whose humour and interests I don't share, and I'd like to filter out any thread with that stupid necro-post image.

/grumpy old man

[SNIPERDUDE]

Despite my post average being less than 0.5 per day, even after 4 years I don't come close to getting access to the VIP lounge.

[md]

I wish post counts would reflect all posts - no matter where they are.

Access to the restricted areas should be limited by account age, not by number of posts.

[rdrake]

SNIPERDUDE @ Tue Feb 23, 2010 1:00 pm wrote:

Despite my post average being less than 0.5 per day, even after 4 years I don't come close to getting access to the VIP lounge.

Or be awesome like us mods and you'll gain access to it.

[apomb]

Hey hey, this is a very sensitive subject for us old-yet quiet users.

My own hobbies have changed since I first joined, and therefore, I do not have any current programming interests to talk about, but I still like this community, and come around probably twice to sevral times a day.

I agree with everything md said.

[SNIPERDUDE]

I'm also going to have to agree with md's comment. I haven't done much coding in a while (at least any that I've needed to post help for), and most of my posts now occur in the off-topic thread.

[[Gandalf]]

If that were to happen, it would be nice to get something done about useless crap like this.

[SNIPERDUDE]

Agreed. That user posted about 5 spam threads that day.