Toggle Post Totals On/Off
 

This is a thread asking of those members that would like the option to toggle their post/review/hcl counts listed on each of their posts under their name either on or off.

Benefits I feel makes this unique:
Get's rid of a few queries against the server to help with the load.
Quality and not quantity for those that care about the quality of posts and reviews, not who has the most.

Feedback or suggestions on such an option here at LQ?

A number of people have 0 reviews, 0 hcl, whatever. Allowing them to turn this off would get rid of rather... irrelevent information. Just like not listing a location for those who have not filled that in on their profiles.

Also, you forgot this as a benefit: customization. People like to be able to tweak settings, we all know it. :)

While I'm all for reducing server load, I must say I'd never use that toggle, because, right or wrong, I tend to give more weight to posts by somebody who's been around here frequently and long (I tend to look at registration dates, too) than to somebody with only one or two posts.

But if a lot of people would use it, and it would reduce operating costs by easing server load, I'm all for it anyway.

Just to clarify, it wouldn't reduce any queries as you'd have to do a query to check if the use had toggled it off. This isn't something I'd like to see be different between users FWIW. It should be uniform across the site.

--jeremy

I was under the impression that all 3 entries for posts, reviews and the hcl were 3 different queries, so if you toggled it off, it would cut that down to one query to display or not.. :)

Jeremy makes an excellent point of consistency across the site. Also, what does the /4 on reviews mean? I've only noticed this as of the past day or two... either I was just blind before, or it's something new?

Haha.. I knew this would be asked.. read this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=301707

It's the one that brought my suggestion up here for this thread..

Along these lines, it looks like everyone has a "denominator" value of 4, ie, "x/4", where x can vary. -- J.W.

First, some background thoughts on the post count issue:

In the long run, I would like to add that most people do not look at post counts as a serious measure of competence. Mind you, I said competence. Yet it is hard to deny that post counts are a measure of experience, at least in the community.

Do you know the psychology here? Yes. Almost everybody feels that post counts are useless, but most people vote that it stays, purely because it is a measure or an indication of your contribution (useful or useless) to the community.

Let me also add that it is highly unlikely (though possible) that a person with > 1000 posts in this community will have very little competence or knowledge in that community. Post counts do serve a purpose and they are quite legitimate in my opinion.

I am opening a highly controversial thing here, but do I believe that a community can be successful by purely adopting an "all are equal and will remain equal regardless of their experience or knowledge"? I believe that each and every regular member strives to earn more respect by posting usefully and posting helpfully. In some ways, a regular member > 1000 posts will get the respect, like it or not, of the new members. The respect has been earned through previous posts. While the answers provided may not always be of high quality, it shows that a member with > 1000 posts has been around for some time and has contributed and shown willingness to spend time to help. People value this attitude more than the accuracy of the answers. There may be exceptions of course, but I do believe that regular contributors are more likely to stick around to help a newcomer solve a problem than a fairly new member.

Let me just say that the rare cases where a person with > 1000 posts who posts useless information all the time and/or has a bad attitude gets found out very very quickly.

Now, coming to the topic in discussion here:

In this light, do I think that individual members should be allowed to toggle post counts on/off? I do believe that since this information is not so obtrusive and not blaring out at the reader, it is not worth the extra effort to include this feature. The post count is also fairly easy to ignore. The display of post counting is fairly unobtrusive and not such a big issue as to warrant a toggle switch in the user control panel.