Yeah I agree, if seeing a small number next to someone's nick predisposes you to being offhand with them, then that is all the more reason to hide this feature. The amount a person posts means nothing. A small post count could mean the person always finds his help in the help file first.
That could be a scenario, yes, however I never said the only deciding factor is their post count. And how will hiding it stop such judgements? Ok so then I (and most people here who I'm sure do the same thing but won't admit it), no longer base it on the number, we base it on whether we remember seeing many posts by that name. Therefore it would be even less "fair" since someone may have posted hundreds of times, yet since I don't remember them, I don't spend the extra time to answer them.
Also the post count isn't detailed enough to assist those kind of judgements, You can't tell if a person has made a thousand feature suggestions, and only 1 helpful reply to someone, for example.
Can you list me someone who has made a thousand feature suggestions and only one helpful reply? If it is a valid issue, it must actually happen on these forums. In fact, this situation doesn't happen. Seeing as how I read just about every post made on these forums, I have yet to notice anyone who has a post count of 1001 where 1000 of those posts appear in the feature suggestion forum.
Khaled for instance, has a very low post count. Can something negative about him be inferred from that also?
Please read what I wrote not what you imply. I said a high post count makes me more inclined to help them in more detail. That doean't mean post count is 100% the ONLY factor I use when deciding how to answer a question. I never said anything like that. If I saw the person was a moderator or administrator of the forum that would clearly supercede their post count.
Oh and btw to those suggesting showing the "rating," have any of you ever taken a class in statistics? A mean average alone is useless. Ok so lets say I have 2 stars out of a possible 5. Is that good or bad? First opinion is it is bad, it's not even half. However if I add the fact that everyone except me has 1 star, now my 2 stars looks pretty good. Also, how many people voted? If I have 5 stars but only received one vote (which was obviously 5 stars) that clearly isn't as good of a representation as someone who has 4 stars but has 5000 votes. Statistical information is not a single number, it requires a great deal of information to actually be useful. If people are saying the post count is too little information to be useful, I don't see how a rating could be any more useful.
