No more post counts

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I was being a little sarcastic. ;)

Not all users choose to provide their location. I feel that 'country' should be mandatory, as it makes it easier to provide buying advice. No point in quoting good deals at egg.com for those in UK.
 
My opinion is that removing or hiding post counts won't change the attitudes. The users will continue posting like they have done to this day. It's just that people are different, with different senses of humor etc. Some people might find it funny to reply with 'LOL' or something similar here, but as for myself, I only do that on IRC.

Another reason why I find post counts somewhat useful is what SNGX1275 said:
when I'm new to a forum I like to see how many posts a person thats replying has, that helps in deciding how valid their advice is, usually. I also think it is better than showing when someone joined.

MrGaribaldi's idea about a minimum post length is not bad but it has flaws - for example, what prevents people from writing longer useless posts? Besides, I have done a lot of one-sentence replies, have they been nonsense? ;)
 
Whats wrong with the way it is now? The influx of rubbish posts we have had recently may be caused by one of the obvious being overlooked: we have more traffic than 'back in the day'. So we are getting more new members, and keeping the percentage of "bad posters or posts" the same the number increases with more members joining.
I guess my point is that these ideas seem good at first, but the more you look into them the more flaws you can find. I think its good to have a thread like this to discuss options, don't get me wrong. But so far I'm not sure any of these ideas are going to fix a problem that we have always had, its just more noticible now since we have more posters than we have had in the past.
I say moderators just keep doing their jobs, maybe utilizing the PM feature more on members that are starting to post a little less mature than what we (as a forum) like to see. I don't really view this as a problem like I did not all that long ago, I realize its just something thats going to happen, but if moderators and the general population on the forum can just make an effort to post at a certain 'standard' level new members will see that and take notice.
 
How about a link next to each member's posts, labelled "Nominate this member" ?

Nominations are statistically analysed each month, we get a number of awared - Member of the Month, Best Newcommer, Honourable Mentions...

You are prohibited from voting for yourself.

Also it would be nice if there were more prizes, but to afford this the site may have to use more advertising, or think up some other form of revenue collection.
 
Originally posted by Phantasm66
How about a link next to each member's posts, labelled "Nominate this member" ?

Nominations are statistically analysed each month, we get a number of awared - Member of the Month, Best Newcommer, Honourable Mentions...

You are prohibited from voting for yourself.

Also it would be nice if there were more prizes, but to afford this the site may have to use more advertising, or think up some other form of revenue collection.

Seems a very good idea to me :) that's what I was talking about since the beginning :p

Too bad we can't vote for ourselves, I'm sure Phant would have many many votes with all his clones :D

As about ads, if we know it makes our TS more active and stuff, why not :grinthumb most of us are blocking any popups anyway, so go on, add tons of'em so we all get killer hardware delivered at home by hot chicks :cool:
 
Originally posted by DigitAlex
I'm sure Phant would have many many votes with all his clones

As my first act, I will create a grand army of the Republic, under the increasing threats of the post spammers.....! ;)

palpatine.jpg
 
Originally posted by Phantasm66
How about a link next to each member's posts, labelled "Nominate this member" ?

Nominations are statistically analysed each month, we get a number of awared - Member of the Month, Best Newcommer, Honourable Mentions...

You are prohibited from voting for yourself.

Also it would be nice if there were more prizes, but to afford this the site may have to use more advertising, or think up some other form of revenue collection.


Mind you, then we will have some butt wipe register under a different name and vote form himself a hundred million times !!!

But then again, the damage done to that could be almost nullified by making it impossible to give a vote to one person more than once in any month period. But you could vote for more than one person. Maybe you could have ten votes or so for each month to give out. You could accumulate the capacity to give out more votes as you stayed longer on the forums and posted more, but actual post count stats would be hidden more away.

It would also be nice to have a "LOSER" action, where someone who had behaved badly during any period was mentioned. I am not talking about totally being unpleasant to that person or anything, just a bit of fun, but it might make them think about their conduct.

Another idea is to be able to positively or negatively weight posts based on your opinions of them, ranking from -5(awful) to 0(neutral) to 5(excellent.) Again, you would then only be able to vote for a post once.
 
Thats a fine idea P66 as it doesn't change things, but provides incentive to create better posts. It gets my vote. ;)

PS: If you're worried about people voting for themselves, then we can always track who votes for whom. Any foul play should then be easy enough to spot.
 
Yeah, either you vote for a member, or you vote for posts. And there is a limit to how much you can vote (to stop people brute force voting for themselves to unnaturally high results.)

Every month there is a kind of winners announcement, of sorts.

And prizes would be nice... Julio.... :) ;) - But I know that budget doesn't run to that very likely.
 
Oh, and another reason I really wanna get rid of post counts is that I like to be able to guilt freely double or tribble post if I want to and not have that weighted in any way towards a quality scale.

I like being able to double post to make more than one point. If I think of something else to say minutes after my first post its like starting and stopping talking more naturally....

Just a thought.

Whatever happens, certainly no more direct co-relation between number of posts and ranking, with no other factors taken into consideration. Perhaps just a straight getting rid of ranking all together.
 
P66: I don't know if you are aware, but you can edit your posts even after they have been commited. I do this occassionally, when I forgot to put something in.
 
/me slaps Nic ;)

Yeah man. Don't worry. I had figured that out. I have access to a great number of controls here that you don't. Please believe me when I say I have already noticed that thanks. ;)

What I was saying is that having several consecutive posts rather than one long rambling one that you've been back and forth between editing several times is better perhaps. Its more in keeping with the linear quality of the forums.

Because of the post count, its been seen as a bad thing, but I don't feel that it is, or that it should necessarily be.
 
/me thinks to himself where is this hidden "EDIT" button anyway? ;)

No seriously man, I had noticed that. Its next to the also popular "QUOTE" button, of which I am also fond.
 
Originally posted by Phantasm66
/me thinks to himself where is this hidden "EDIT" button anyway? ;)

No seriously man, I had noticed that. Its next to the also popular "QUOTE" button, of which I am also fond.

What quote button?
You mean you don't type [ QUOTE ] [ /QUOTE ] everytime???? :rolleyes:

Personally I think the whole rating system being suggested is a lot of work for julio and other staff members. Probably more than its actually worth. If someone with a high post count who just spams says something and someone reads it and acts upon it/spends upon it/believes it then its their fault for not researching the matter more thoroughly. I don't take the first person who says "Intel are buying AMD" as being correct, I go find out more about it, or at least wait for some proof!

Those are just my thoughts on this matter, but I have been having a horrible day with lots of nested loops and screwy programming logic :(
 
Originally posted by SNGX1275
Whats wrong with the way it is now?


Nothing really...
And I think I posted that in another similar thread...

But since we were on the topic I thought I'd suggest a way which I feel would be better than the one suggested by Phantasm...

timmmore> The 5 stars wouldn't be too bad, but (if I understand you correctly), it won't change things much... It would be the same as it is with rank today...

And I'm against letting everyone vote on each post... Most users would most likely just ignore the function, and those who really cared how high they are would only create x^n new accounts to vote with....

For the "moderators could be biased", yes they sure could be... But with my suggestion, they'd actively have to do something... They'd have to mark the message(s) as "not counting towards postcount"... That alone should discourage any "casual" "cheating", and if it happened quite a lot to one users, it wouldn't be harder for that person to complain to Julio, and he'd check which mod was marking all those messages, and ask him why...


But Phantasm idea of nominating posts could be a very good idea...
If we let people nominate users, then we'd still get the same problem of people registering lord knows how many accounts, but if we limit it only to posts, it would be obvious if someone was trying to inflate their score...
It would also be quite interesting to see what posts would make it to the top, if we only allowed each user to vote for 5 posts (and not his own!)...

With limiting the votes to 5 per person, the person would have to be sure that the post (s)he's voting for is worthy...
And it could be a good incentive to make people make "better" posts (better layout, well thought out etc)...


Mict> I admitted there were flaws with the system I suggested, but that I thought it had fewer flaws than what Phantasm originally suggested...
And as far as "I've written helpful answers that were less than 3 sentences"...
Well, it shouldn't be too hard to add a couple of more lines to the post, maybe describing why you think it'll fix the problem, if it were said anywhere else etc...

And the problem with people writing longer BS posts, I think that will be covered by moderators having the ability to mark a post, so it wouldn't count towards the postcount...

.02$

I'll end this post by quoting SNGX1275, as I think he made quite a lot of good points!
Originally posted bySNGX1275 :
What if we keep the current ranking and postcount as it is today

The influx of rubbish posts we have had recently may be caused by one of the obvious being overlooked: we have more traffic than 'back in the day'. So we are getting more new members, and keeping the percentage of "bad posters or posts" the same the number increases with more members joining.
I guess my point is that these ideas seem good at first, but the more you look into them the more flaws you can find. I think its good to have a thread like this to discuss options, don't get me wrong. But so far I'm not sure any of these ideas are going to fix a problem that we have always had, its just more noticible now since we have more posters than we have had in the past.
I say moderators just keep doing their jobs, maybe utilizing the PM feature more on members that are starting to post a little less mature than what we (as a forum) like to see. I don't really view this as a problem like I did not all that long ago, I realize its just something thats going to happen, but if moderators and the general population on the forum can just make an effort to post at a certain 'standard' level new members will see that and take notice.
 
Originally posted by Arris
What quote button?
You mean you don't type [ QUOTE ] [ /QUOTE ] everytime???? :rolleyes:


Hmm... I hadn't noticed there were a button for doing that...
But then again, having to move my hand over to the mouse, click the button, enter in some text, then clickin "ok" is more a hassle than writing the code by hand...
And for quoting someone repetedly, there's allways <ctrl>+<c> :)

Originally posted by Arris Personally I think the whole rating system being suggested is a lot of work for julio and other staff members. Probably more than its actually worth.

Good point... Though Julio mentioned there was going to be some sort of voting/rating implented in the next version of vB in his thread about this topic....

OT: Do you realize this is the third thread we've got about this topic since february!

Originally posted by Arris
Those are just my thoughts on this matter, but I have been having a horrible day with lots of nested loops and screwy programming logic :(

I can understand that... Had a similar experience yesterday hand coding (on paper!) a simple database.... But now the exam is over :)
 
Originally posted by MrGaribaldi
Good point... Though Julio mentioned there was going to be some sort of voting/rating implented in the next version of vB in his thread about this topic.... [/B]


That could be interesting.
 
One problem with a voting system is, when does a user actually get to cast his vote? What if he uses up his votes, and as the thread continues, better posts are made? When does the voting close?

Voting may, or may not, be a good idea, though perhaps moderators could give credits to the first response that solves a users problem (for problem queries). Just another idea to confuse things further.

This whole issue is complex and isn't going to reach a satifactory conclusion soon, but at least we have some idea of what the problems are through this discussion. :)

PS: As to editing already commited posts, I only do this if my post is the last one in the thread, and I don't care about post counts so I edit instead.
 
Thanks for all your input, this translates to me into you worrying about the community.

The whole discussion about removing post counts (which we had discussed before & actually I believe I suggested that too), its real purpose would be that of getting a bigger number of useful posts and to stop worrying and telling new members (or recidivists) what kind of comments are welcomed and what not.

Some of you did remember I mentioned a new feature of vBulletin 3.0 that hopefully will deliver what you and I want, see this link for more info:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=62743

User rating - Karma
User ranking
 
That's great Julio ;) ! Now I am all excited about all these new features, unfortunately I won't be able to use them all, but that's life :) . When are you expected to receive this new build of vB, if you don't mind my asking?

BTW, is it just me, or since this thread has come up people seem to be posting a lot more maturely and informative these recent days? Not saying we should scrap the idea, just making a positive remark; keep up the good work! And I won't mention again that I am willing to give you hard working mods, staffs and admins any help you require, be it leaving the boards thus stopping all of the bad posts from their roots to doing the Macarena after each post :p !
 
the list of VB3 features is totally awesome

WOW

we don't even notice how advanced the system we use is !!

well i guess it's not for free though... does it cost much money to techspot Julio ? :)
 
TechSpot owns a vB license however that only comes with one year of support/updates (though we can continue using the board), our year of updates already expired but we will definitely get an extension once vB 3 is released.

The software doesn't cost much, at least for the kind of program you get, $160 for an owned license it's not expensive even though nowadays you can get similar powerful boards (haven't used them myself though) that are free and open source such as Invision Boards or phpBB.
 
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