Post count returning? Content count plus app count timeline

[chilihead]

In March @Lindy said:

Quote

The content count will remain as a global count, but we will be adding per-app counts to the profile.

Was wondering when this is returning? The author pane for forums still says "Posts" which is highly confusing since it is content, plus members use post count often to announce how long they have been on the site using these mile markers, but uploading 500 images is throwing it all off. Members gauge other members based on post count. Plus promotions based on posts are useful, etc. Thanks!

[esquire]

On 11/26/2015, 7:02:23, chilihead said:

In March @Lindy said:

Was wondering when this is returning? The author pane for forums still says "Posts" which is highly confusing since it is content, plus members use post count often to announce how long they have been on the site using these mile markers, but uploading 500 images is throwing it all off. Members gauge other members based on post count. Plus promotions based on posts are useful, etc. Thanks!

If CC is going to be used then it MUST CLEARLY (a) delineate the breakdown of the content produced in easy and conspicuous fashion; and (b) enable the site owner with the ability to award/rate users using your own scale to determine what content is most valuable.  Personally I'd rather use "points" instead of raw content count. I don't think anyone gives a damn about content count without context. Having 7,539 "things" is a useless metric. It could mean 5,000 images a user uploaded to their private gallery. It's only meaningful when, at a glance, a user can see "oh... this dude has 7,400 posts and 122 files so he must be a very active poster of messages and probably a developer! Woohoo! And that is where assigning points to content for value can indicate - at a glance - which user is clearly more valuable based upon their content contributions.

PS - I see "content count" is in your profile but "posts" is here in the forum. 

[Lindy]

I still don't "get" using posts, content items, etc. as metrics to determine worth of a member. It seems, if you were to do anything, you'd gauge someone's value to your community by other members finding value in their content -- ie: 'Like' which is covered via reputation. Someone may have 2,500 "posts" - but 2,000 of them are support questions... or just a bunch of "+1's" -- it is absolutely no indication of substance. Personally, I think "join date" and "post count" are awful ways to say Member A is more valuable than Member B.... but, it's your community and you can of course run it as you see fit. 

1) We do still intend on isolating application counts. My apologies we've not gotten to this yet. Note - when viewing a topic, it will show overall submissions - not just forum posts. I suspect you could make a template edit after we're done with implementation to list just forum posts. Initially, we didn't have the word "posts" in IPS4 - I believe we had submissions and people complained. I for one would be open to changing it to something else as it is indeed misleading. 

2) We do plan significant enhancements to the reputation system next year. I would use make use of that before hanging my hat on the number of arbitrary submissions to the database, but that's just me.  

[chilihead]

Thanks for the update. I would love to see reputation enhanced as that has its own limitations when it comes to determining worth. So looking forward to seeing where that goes. And the clarification of the count in the author pane and breakdown, respectively, will aid in clearing up confusion and offer more digestible information to those that find it useful. I would like to see the related app count in the author pane for the app they are in (the way search works), and the total/breakdown on the profile page, but all in all, good stuff.  

[esquire]

4 hours ago, Lindy said:

I still don't "get" using posts, content items, etc. as metrics to determine worth of a member. It seems, if you were to do anything, you'd gauge someone's value to your community by other members finding value in their content -- ie: 'Like' which is covered via reputation. Someone may have 2,500 "posts" - but 2,000 of them are support questions... or just a bunch of "+1's" -- it is absolutely no indication of substance. Personally, I think "join date" and "post count" are awful ways to say Member A is more valuable than Member B.... but, it's your community and you can of course run it as you see fit. 

Thanks for the response and the candor. I'd love to hear the reasoning behind  "content count" -  I'm all in favor of progress. If this is truly a better way, great! I think it can be a great method but it has to finish the job - see below.

Regarding the module count, it's the most easily definable metric to say "user is active / not active in this area of the site." If a user has 5,130 forum posts like chilihead, then I know he's a very active forum participant. If he has 720 uploads in gallery, I know he's very active in sending up photos, perhaps providing clip art in a forum that provides it. If he has zero file uploads then I'm guessing he's not a developer. But if I see "5,130 content stuff" then all I know is that he's done a lot of stuff. You glean much less at a glance from content count than you do module count, especially if your site revolves around ONE module (as most do) such as forum posts. This is the reason why I said that if there is still an insistence on a "stuff/content count" then the way to make that metric meaningful is to have something like a v-card hovering over the "stuff count" post that sets out the stuff or have an option to spell it out under their member profile:

Forum icon: 5,130
Image icon: 720
File icon: 0

Now you know exactly where the user contributes most. If I'm a photographer I might choose to follow chili. If I'm someone looking for addons, templates or files I may not think he's the member I'm looking for. 

Regarding "reputation" - I'm still not sure what that means. is a +1 for Gallery the same as +1 for Forums? Do good high quality vacation photos increase one's reputation in the forum? It's all what people make of that general metric.I tend not to think through it too much unless there is one dominant module, e.g. an expert site where most reputation would be in the forum. See below how these types of addons can be meaningful IF you can connect them in a way that will award users directly for specific types of behavior.

4 hours ago, Lindy said:

Personally, I think "join date" and "post count" are awful ways to say Member A is more valuable than Member B.... but, it's your community and you can of course run it as you see fit. 

This is what "points" are supposed to be. There is no absolute metric that applies to all communities as to what they deem valuable. It's why many have been imploring to add the same credits/points systems that every add-on developer has consistently created for years, e.g. vbexperience, et. al. The site owner puts value on the contributions they deem most important, e.g. a clip art community where you get 15 points for a photo and just 2 for a forum post. This way the person with a ton of points who seems "valuable" and is promoted to higher experience/user levels gets there because the most important type of content is rewarded the best by the site owner. And if reputation is part of the equation, e.g. high quality photos get 5 points for every +1, you've got the makings of a system that gets you a little further towards providing some metric that discerns your more valuable / contributing members from others.

Thank you for opening up the forum for conversation. I think everyone appreciates your willingness to entertain discussion so as to take these things into consideration in the IPS board room.  

 

[Colonel_mortis]

Post count isn't the best metric for judging members, but it is certainly a metric that can be taken into consideration. If a member has 1k posts on the forum and starts posting advertising, they would be treated differently to a member for whom it is their first post, and differently again to a member with 100 posts.

Reputation is far from being the perfect tool to judge people by either - lots of people use like to mean "funny" and not "it's a good post, even though it didn't solve my issue on this occasion", so a member's reputation isn't representative of how good a member they are either.

It is possible to prevent a subforum from counting towards a member's content count, so I think it would be useful to be able to prevent an app from counting as well. Having the option for all content to count towards the global number is great, but it would also be really useful if the admin could make a specific app (eg the gallery, where people can bulk upload images that don't really contribute to the community on a number of sites) not count towards the global count. That way, the content count will actually reflect that member's contribution to the core site.

A weighting system would be even better, though I could see that being confusing to users if not implemented very well (eg if it just straight up replaced content count).

[sasiko]

content count can be easily spammed up with commments etc. If you have sub forum section with count requirement. then content counts would be proven useless. 

The forum restriction is supposed to reward members with contructive forum posts, not posting short message on file comments, gallery comments etc