Hiding Member Post Counts in Posts

It seems like more and more forums these days are removing the post count from the postbit in posts. Are you one of them? If so, why did you remove it?
Did it resolve the problem (if any) that you were facing?

 

To be honest, I don't see the point in doing this.

While the success of a community should not be based solely on the amount of posts achieved, it's something that should certainly not be ignored. On a member-to-member basis, this can sometimes prove to be crucial (i.e. rewarding the members with the most activity). Having a high post count is something that many members look forward to sharing with the community. Why take this opportunity away from them?

 

I am planning on replacing it with the meter of a pointssystem, so not only posts will matter and members still can "collect" something.

 

I disagree, Chris. On a lot of forums, (and this really depends on the audience and member demographic) but some people don't value the posts made by new users. It's silly, but it happens. Somebody might see a response from somebody with only one post, and they will think (and even respond!), "Oh that's your first post, so there's no point in believing it."

On the forums I've seen it happen on, they only remove the post count from the postbit, to prevent the aforementioned discrimination. But it's still available and viewable in the member profile, so it's not like it is completely hidden.

 

Ah, valid point, Nick. That's something that I did not think of while writing that post.

 

It's optional on my forum regarding whether you see them or not. Some users figure they are at the site for the music and don't care how many posts a user has. They do care about how many torrents users have uploaded or what their ratio is, so those things are shown in the postbit. The ones who care about post count are those who play in The Lounge, and they can turn it on if they'd like.

 

I generally tend to leave mine on simply because I find it helps to motivate the community sometimes to help the forum reach the next goal and feel they contributed to making the forum a better forum.

 

Haha, me too.

My personal preference, though, is the little modification that we have here now to allow the user to decide what is shown in their postbit. The option to do this is shown on the registration page, so if someone new wants to jump right into the action without having to worry about what Nick mentioned, they can choose to not show their join date and post count before their profile is even put into the database.

 

Uhh, I don't. My members on Pisoga are proud of their post count, they are happy, I am happy.

 

Nope, dont see any reason to hide it.

 

I wouldn't try that. In the absence of obvious wealth or physical beauty, human beings seem to need some way of assessing status and reputation, and post count is just one of the ways we provide to figure it out. I do like to use it in conjunction with the Thanks mod for a second measurement, but I wouldn't get rid of post count entirely.