User Post Count

Truestar · Moderator

One thing that every admin fears is users joining your site to just get ranks from post count. Many admins avoid this by either having no ranks at all, or dealing with them by other means.

I'm definitely having ranks, nobody will change my mind. But I want to know how I should deal with those users who just spam to get a post count.

I know I have many options, and probably if this happens it will obviously result in a ban. However I question that MOD concerning user post count.

I don't know which one it is but it makes it so you can travel to your ACP and change the "number of posts" a user has. I was wondering if this is one way to help solve the problem. Maybe the user will get the point?

Now I know your first thoughts are, "If they are causing trouble like this ban them." But that isn't really the point I have. I was wondering if you considered this MOD "cheating" or avoiding the obvious. I know I will ban users for this crime but I just wanted to know about how you feel about this MOD. Smile

Would you recommend it, or ignore it?
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Patrick · Administrator

Hello,

Well, you could just make it against your guidelines to create a certain type of post, etc. It's vague and hard, but that'd be one way to do it. If someone bumps all of the threads on my site with "yep", I'll remove all of their posts with Prune User Posts/Post Remover and warn them or if they posted a ton of them, I might ban them.

You could remove the post count display from the template files. Of course, you still have the ranks, so people will be posting to get to theirs, but not displaying the post counts can discourage it.

Myself, I've never been terribly concerned with post counts because they aren't that important. So, I have just left them and if I see anyone bumping threads in an annoying way, which is not particularly common, I handle it.
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User Guidelines

harishankar · Posted: 12/21/2005, 10:44 am Post subject:

Post counts has its goods and bads:

Pros:

* A sort of recognition for long-serving members.
* Easy to distinguish between long time users and newcomers.
* Gives a sort of natural hierarchy to the forum.

Cons:

* Post count spamming.
* Ego of members having a large post count can be difficult to manage.
* Somewhat misleading as to a member's ability or knowledge, especially on technical support forums.
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dojo · Posted: 12/23/2005, 7:15 am Post subject:

I am using ranks in all my forums with GREAT results.

I am not affraid of people spamming their way to higher ranks since they know the posts must be quality ones or are deleted. From the moment they start lurking my potential new members "sense" what the atmosphere is like in the forums.

Some strive to get to better ranks and that;s OK since they also post nice things. As long as you have many threads and have set a good example keeping a higher quality is not that hard anymore. At least in my case ...
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