Quality vs Quantity etc

I was having a thought the other day how it would be useful to hide certain things, mainly post count, join date and possibly even donor or other status.

What I'd like to see is a member is just a member, nothing more, nothing less. Naturally the statistics will still be logged, but the idea being no one can see them so the quality of content is all that people are judged on, not the quantity or join date.

The reason I say this is that there are people out their who focus on such issues and prejudge people before they have a chance to speak. There are some relatively low posters here who don't speak much but when they do it speaks volumes, yet some people will disregard ther information even though they may be pearls of wisdom - with the bullshit out of the way they can be taken more seriously.

Donors will still be donors and their contribution will always be appreciated and their names stored in the fundraiser threads, but in the eyes of all members, each member will just be another member - noob will leave our vocabularly.

Also for example when someone deserves a temporary ban, it causes more troubles as all the new priviledges have to be manually added to the account later to restore normal function so these extra user classes make policing quite annoying.

Does anyone else think this a good idea? If not, why not?

 

I like to see postcountr/joindate if I would be dealing with somebody in the marketplace tbh, as this is also a measurement in trust.

Prejustice maybe, but I would not trust my money to somebody with low post count or recently registered.

Hiding all that will only make it more of a gamble then it already is.

 

The marketplace rules would still be in effect, you just wouldn't see it IMO neither would they until they hit 50 posts.

 

The rules you guys make up are fine, but somebody with 50 posts is in my eyes still not somebody I would trusts blindly.

It's not that hard to hit the 50 and scam us all you know.

For me its a big difference between somebody registed this year with 150 posts and somebody from back in 2005 with 1000+

I agree with the whole member is a member thing outside of the marketplace tho.

 

So I never know if I'm dealing with someone who has 5000 points and joined in 2005 or with someone who has 128 posts and joined this February? That doesn't sound satisfactory.

Anyway, I'm not very keen of this kind of forum rules. The equality aspect is nice in its intentions, but I think it makes a forum very anonymous. I never liked too much being around in forums with all statistics being hidden, it just felt as if you knew no one and nobody wants to know you. You're there, or you're not, it doesn't matter anyway.

And I never had problems appreciating high-quality posts of users with a low post-count. There are many of them around here and there are also some with high post counts with lots of garbage posts among them. If you're really part of a forum, you'll learn to differentiate pretty fast. I don't know if that's really necessary here - as far as I'm concerned, there are no users that post an annoying quantity of shit-posts (not right now at least ).

 

This is true but one would hope their charcter would be sufficient (as no post count or join date IRL/shops/marktet!) and we do have the feedback forum

 

We do have join dates/selling counts on ebay and local second hand online shops etc.. IRL this is irrelavant as we can buy face to face.

 

I'm "new" here all my 5 post are from this year, but i'm a member since 2006. I know I cannot blindly trusted, and I'm fine with that. The 2/3 persons I deal with here can confirm I'm a good buyer, but then you must trust them... See the problem?
I've brought an item here from a member that cannot sell on marketplace because he didn't have 50 post, I trusted him and all went well. The real problem is we are all persons and you will find someone someday that will scam you, no matter how many post he did.
I'm here to learn and try my best to support the comunity.
We all know who the good guys are here, no matter how many post they did, everyone of them is a nice thing to read.
In another forum I had to made 10 stupid post (IIRC) just to be able to read all subforum, that was pathetic.

Anyway public postcount or not I think we know who are the people to deal with blindy eyes and the one to deal with both eyes open. For new member is a little different, but he just need to read some post to understand...

Do what you think is better for the comunity.

 

and how would removing join date post count and donor stat improve efficiency or sold problems on the forum..

oh thats right it WONT improve anything
and just reduce our identity on the forum

actually knowing someone status is important for identifying a respected and valuable member of the forum and community

 

angelwolf71885 perhaps you don't get it - their words and their behaviour, not an arbitrary figure will determine their worth. Does this help explain it?

 

all these little tags and post counts are peoples EXPERIENCE
witch makes up there forum identity

why do we need to take peoples identity away from them...
ide much rather be able to identify the important members rather then guess

again what problem dose this actually solve?

i cant tell you the number of threads ive wondered into where someone was saying they were better because they had more post count /SARCASM

 

Then by your own logic angelwolf71885, as amember of this version of the forum for 6 years longer than you with 2322 posts more than you my experience should mean you listen to me and this is a good idea?

The answer is no which is my point - I'm not more trustworthy than you by my tenure here but people may automtically treat it as such. I'd like to see end end to the separatism.

The desicion thus far seems to be split down the middle, it may be worthwhile having a few weeks as a trial run and see what happens (especially as untangling the system will fix the temp banning system properly!)

 

The issue is, I dont know everyone here. Im not going to read up on someone's character prior. I dont read every post here, I dont read all the sections, but knowing that someone has established themselves here through post count and join date means, in most cases (not all admittedly), they will be okay. And if they aren't, it usually is apparent.

 

It's a great idea from an ideological perspective, I would like my post count to be hidden and my words taken on their own merit. Anyone who wants to laud their post count or membership duration over another user is suspect in my eyes.

The practical considerations, though, are probably insurmountable. You'd have to enable post counts and membership length on the trade forums, as they're essential there, and that would undermine the purpose of removing that data elsewhere. And that's assuming such a configuration is possible/viable on this version of vBulletin, and also assuming someone's going to implement it. My guess? Things will stay as they are. The fact that we're still running 3.8.4 is testament to something. First move for me would be to remove the "powered by" version ID from the bottom of each page and at least get this place off a simple google search for exploitable forums.

 

At first I thought this was a good idea, because I certainly do not need the post count for my e-penis.

On second thought you can spot the forum veterans at a glance, which preponderates over the bad aspects (bias, e-penis and the like) especially in the market place, as mentioned before.

When I am interested in a discussion I will read every post equally attentively, regardless of the post count or reg. date of the user.

Another thing: when the mods at another forum went nuts renaming members for a joke, I was able to identify most of them thanks to their writing style combined with their post count. So yeah, post count is part of ones online personality.

 

Whether buying or selling you are taking a risk, and it's nice (especially when buying) to be able to take into account the length of time the user has been on the forum and the amount of posts they've made during that time as well as glance over their posts to make sure there's not dozens upon dozens of one sentence posts.

imho people already do judge members by the content of their posts and not the number of them, and with the marketplace being such a large part of these forums it really does help having that information when considering how to go about a deal with someone.

That's just my experience, but I can say with most certainty that being an over cautious buyer when dealing with online purchases has saved me from being defrauded on more than one occasion, so it is nice to have that extra bit of info.

 

But I think I just see a member as a member, nothing more, nothing less now, with stats and stuff, so don't really want to say yes to removing them.

But I think I don't want to say no as well, because of not seeing them like that. When I see a member with very high post count, I don't think he must of spammed to get it or something. And if you see he is an older member from his join date, it probably would explain that, which would only help I think.

 

While I agree with LeGIT that respect and trust should not only be a matter of how many posts you made, how long your dick is, how much you can afford to donate to a pretty swell forum, how strong your father is, or how long you've been hanging in the forums, but rather based on what you say and think, I must admit that post count and Join Date is a great way to evaluate the reliability of someone that you don't know of yet in the marketplace.

There's a lot of people on here, me included, that visit the same 2 or 3 sections all the time without lurking around in the others. Therefore, there's a lot of experienced users or "veterans" that probably don't know of each others and never read each other's posts, removing posts count and join date might stop these people from dealing together in the marketplace, which is sad as the main goal of this forum, as I see it, is to allow the exchange of tools and knowledge about the rare and obscure dev gaming stuff.

I don't think it should be abolished for these reasons.

My 2 cents,

FG

 

While I havent posted as much as most id much rather keep the post count/join date really gives you an idea of how long the person has been an active user on the site.

 

Instead how about limiting posts to like 5/day and 20/week? People would choose their posts wiser.

And/or adding a thanks/karma system so people can get recognition even if they have a low post count.

And/or some kind of "stackoverflow" system where posts are sorted by agreement so people with something to say are heard and the many worthless posts are obscured.