Forum-idea: StarCount

[Nikolai]

/me envisions what my thread mastering of the List for Civ4 could have done for his star rating. But then he remembers that those posts are few compared to the ones made the rest of the six years he's been here.

[Solver]

And Solver, I must say that posters who are counting their characters, are pondering on what they can post to higher their starcount, are a plus to the site. That's much better then the "How can I as fast as possible post 100 spam messages to get to King"

100 messages isn't King, but I don't think posters that care too obsessively about postcounts, stars or titles would be a benefit to the site. We already have jackass spam here. Stars will give birth to another form of jackassery. I really don't believe you'll find users who (now) make quality posts, and will then pay serious attention to their stars.

Let's just ban CS instead .

[Robert]

Maybe those quality posters will like it to be reckognized by the site by getting a lot of stars :P

And yes, banning me will really remove a lot of quality posts from poly :P

[Ming]

A real key factor that has to be kept in mind is the time requirements by the mods. These are indeed active forums, and there is no way for EVERY post to be viewed by a mod. We would need to actually READ the long posts to make a value judgement on whether it was just padding, or a legit post. The current mod staff isn't big enough to do that. Even adding another mod or two wouldn't be enough. And then, it would just be a matter of opinion, which means the classic trading of PM's saying the mods are wrong.

This whole process would be very time consuming...

And frankly, I don't see the potential positives out weighing the potential negatives.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Solver
Let's just ban CS instead .

I was scared that this was a typo, until I realised that the "C" key is pretty far from the "L" key

[Robert]

I don't think that every long post has to be examined for having a reason to be that long.
I feel like, if someone makes a long post and just types a lot of BS, then so be it. Takes him a lot of time.

The only things that should be token action against is long copied/pasted posts, which do clearly stand out with one blink of the eye. And the repeated copy/paste actions (100x I disagree, etc.) which is easily to spot with one blink of the eye as well.

Remember that it only makes sence to copy large wikipedia articles if it's 500+ characters. (the time to go to wikipedia, find the right topic, edit out all obvious stuff and paste it in the right format)
And those 500+ posts do stand out very clearly. If someone makes many of those posts, then it's easy to spot. And once again, one 1000+ wikipedia post won't give a poster who posts over 1000 posts a large starcount.

Conclusion: I think it won't make things difficult at all. There's no use for any poster in raising his postcount by excessive large post posting without content. Why not? Because it takes a lot of time to post long posts.

[Skanky Burns]

Verbosity is nothing to be rewarded for.

[Heresson]

I am against this idea, and here is why

[Provost Harrison]

You do realise that this would make Pekka and CivNation our top posters

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Heresson
I am against this idea, and here is why

I tell you, that one must be inspired by GSK Dartford QA

[Heresson]

And what is it? A company, surely, but what kind of it?

[joncha]

tldr

[Heresson]

what?

[Robert]

These guys (Heresson, joncha) would've lost much StarCount with the spamposts above. They would most probably not have bothered to post because of that, which would've kept this thread spam-free.

[Solver]

That is a very false perception of the situation. We have better ways of dealing with spammers that have been proven to work over many years. PCRs and bans do the job very well. If you don't see these mentioned in the public, doesn't mean they don't happen - and if they don't happen, that doesn't mean that the spammers aren't being warned privately or other measures taken.

The star system would also give mods a bunch of extra work that they absolutely don't need - not only dealing with those who abuse post counts, but also with those who abuse the star system. All of that for a feature in which I still fail to see a single potentially useful component. And while I agreed with you that this "bling" might be of interest to some people, I actually believe that we're better off without new posters that post because of that, than we are with such people.