Post Count

[KingLeerUK]

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

As a reader of this forum I think removing the post counts is the wrong move. Making information easily accessible to all readers is what forums thrive on.

Reasonable opening statement and logical assessment of what the forums are designed to do.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

Of course there are the posters who go overboard looking to artificially inflate their post count

Sadly, there are a TON of these sorts here.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

but one can gleam relevant information from knowing a poster's total.

The only relevant information you can determine from a members post count is the number of times they have posted. That's it.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

I don't think the signal to noise ratio has gone down recently and I read the forums everyday. If anything the signal to noise ratio has gotten better since HD DVD died and with it much of the trolling.

The trolling aspect has certainly tapered off a bit, but there is a certain contingent, I like to think of as "The MySpace Brigade", that has latched on to this community and used it as their personal sounding board. Instead of discussing things with relavance to Blu-ray, we get endless posts about "What colour socks are you wearing today?", "My Sweet-ass Blu-ray Collectionl, Praise ME!" and "Dear God I Need Attention Or I Will F'ing Die". I don't want to be one to try and dictate the value of content here at the forums, but no doubt MANY will agree that there is a ton of absolute rubbish posted here with frightening regularity.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

The post count provides a little context to what the person is talking about.

It does not. As already stated, post count is purely an incremental number that represents the number of times a person has posted. It says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the quality of an individuals posts. Trained monkeys could sit and keyboards and input "+1" [SUBMIT] all day long and rack up post counts into the millions, but they would still be monkeys, crapping on the table and complaining about post counts.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

I'm much more likely to pay attention to a poster who has several thousand posts because it shows they've stuck around a while and have made some type of contribution to this forum.

The problem is that much of the "contribution" of members with multi-thousands of post is embodied by the following:

+1

While it's certainly fine to agree with the opinion of a previous poster, some token effort should be made to qualify your agreement. The "+1 Syndrome" screams of immaturity and laziness and is very often used to pad post counts.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

I'm not planning to click through every time I think the post count might be relevant as it simply will take too much time.

The post count should never be relevant. The content of the response is what is relevant. If we had a way of qualifying the content of contributor responses you would have a useful measuring stick on which to base the veracity of what you are reading.

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

And while I have the moderators' attention I bring up a sidebar to this discussion. I brought this up in another thread in feedback but I will reiterate it here. The trading score line in our posts should disappear for people with a trading count of "0". It's truly a useless piece of information that adds nothing and visually distracts while reading posts, especially now that the post count number has also been taken away. Thank you for listening and have a good day...

I do agree that the trading score should not be a part of the "default" user information presented to each user. If you are interested in trading with another member you should be wise enough to look at their profile details page and THAT is where the Trading Score should reside.