I got the idea yesterday, when reading through the forum. People are tired of spam and useless posts, and I am quite sure, removing the postcount from the profiles could solve this problem.

To explain why this could help I will go into detail. This should be a kind of discussion, giving you pros and cons.


I claim that most spam and "minimal posts" are just posted to increase the postcount. People think a higher postcount stands for things like fame, experience, coolness or even authority, so they just focus on the quantity of their posts to increase these, and not the quality of them. In fact, the postcount says nothing about those qualities. You can post "Cool script" 5000 times and you wont increase a shit in experience or authority. Your fame and coolness also decreases because you annoy people and they do not like you because of the spam.
The quality of your posts is the thing that increases the named attributes. Look at the users of this forum who are really popular. Most of them are well-known scripters with great experience, or staff members. And lots of them do not even have 200 posts. They are just polular because of the stuff they post, not their postcount.
I also claim that removing the postcount would prevent the "quantity posting" and spam. If their is no postcount, there is no reason to post useless 4-char-posts because you wont get any "reward" for them. This means, people wont post just for their postcount or any kind of "reward", but to help someone with his problem / take part in the discussion / give a useful feedback, or in short to post something because of the content.
This would minimize spam to a minimum, which leads to less work for the moderators and a better and "more effective" forum.

People might state points against this, and I am not saying they are wrong, but I am posting this to discuss with those who do not agree with me.
For example some might say, postcount and spam has nothing to do with each other. I tired to convince that they do have, give me some proof then and we can discuss about this.
Others could say, removing the postcount would change nothing, people will still spam, and I do not say there wont be any spam. Some kinds of spam like server ads etc will still remain and some people will still spam because they think this will make them more famous in the community, but this will be reduced to a minimum.
Some users might see their postcount as a part of their forum identity, because they think the postcount gives a feedback about what a users has reached in the community, and removing it also remove a part of every users history. To have something that represents your forum identity, ive got another suggestion:

The postcount could be replaced with a thank- and rate-system, as lots of other forums use. Users can rate posts and users or thank them for posts. In contrast to the postcount, this would really say something about a user's fame, experience, coolness or authority. A user with lots of positive rates will be popular or famous, because there are a lot of people who like him and rated him positively. If an user has been thanked a lot of times, you can be quite sure that he is experienced and he knows what he is doing, as he has successfully helped a lot of people.
Spammers wont get any reward. People will just rate them negatively becuase of spam and useless comments.
As far as I know, enabling the rate and thank system should just be need a few clicks and 5 minutes of work for the admins, as this is a default feature of the vBulletin forum engine. The same with disabling the postcount.


Some people might dont want to read the whole text, so I am giving a short list with all my arguements and points that others give in this topic.

Pros for replacing the postcount by a thank- and/or rate-system:

• Reducing spam because people get no reward for posting useless stuff
• Increasing post quality
• Better and more reliable help for scripting- and other questions
• Users rating will give a real feedback about a user
• Less work for moderators, easy to realize for admins
• Better and cleaner forum

Cons:

• Ad spams and some other spammers (signature etc) wont stop
• Removing a part of a users identity with the postcount, which some people might be proud of
• People might manipulate their reputation (auto scripts, trading)

This is not only addressed to the forum leaders, but also to every user. It would be nice to have a living discussion about this here. I am open for criticism and will add new pro and cons to the list.
But please do not post useless comments. Im asking the moderators to remove spam and useless or offending posts, but not the whole topic. If you should remove this, please send me a message with the reasons, so i know what I did wrong. If the general forum is the wrong place, I'd appreciate if you would just move it instead of deleting it.

So now the discussion is open!

I think this is a very good idea, though only if the reward system you mention is enabled.
In my opinion postcount indeed shows a little your experience and stuff, but only in comparison to your join date.

If I see users with 1,130 posts since Aug 2010 I know they are spammers.
But if I see someone like you, with 851 posts since June 2007, that is to me a sign that you are have some experience and know what you are talking about.

A replacement for this could indeed be a karma system.
One more comment though, if a karma system would be added, make it so that it cannot be a negative number. Some users can find it quite depressing to have -56 karma.

+1, no doubt you are right. I'm 100% precent sure that most of the new members in this comunity are looking to increase thier post-count no matter what.

Agreeeeeeeeeeeeed.
If someone has like 200 posts, 60 percent of it is like spam posts.


He didn't say that he is controlling you. Think and read what your post has to say, before publicizing the phrase.

I agree with this completely.

The thank / rep system would be nice. But we can just add it on to the post count. Then people can judge the experience of people through their rep and not post count which IS deceiving most of the time.

+1

@RealCop23 "Haha i just came here"
uhuh

I'm supporting this suggestion, althought it would be better if the post count could be only displayed to the forum moderators.

I really agree whit Miguel, I aslo support this suggestion.

Thanks for your responses guys, it feels good to know there are people who think about this in the way I do! There were much less hate-spam responses than I expected at the moment.
21/30 people voted FOR removing the postcount so far. It would also be nice to hear why the 7 (6 without UlTrA2GaMeR) guys who voted against it dont like the idea. Dont be shy, just tell it

@Hal: Yep, just adding the new system without removing the postcount would also be an alternative that would at least improve the current situation here a lot. If people do not like to completely remove the postcount, I could not imagine a reason why this system should not be added at least.

@UlTrA2GaMeR: Garsino is one of the users with a high postcount AND a high post-quality. Dont call people spammers because they just caught you spamming please. If you want to say something, say something useful.

It is actually not the matter of post count. It is the matter of their reputation, they post count to actually get more reputation because of their high post count.

They feel it is like making a nuclear bomb if they achieve 1,000 posts, which they also feel that they'll be getting exclusive scripts, free hosting, and special administrator position in some sites and servers, but thats actually not true and will never happen (unless the provider is retarded)