Suggestion - Hide number of posts and join date for a weeks trial

copacetic

I'm sure this must have been suggested or done in the past?

Will vbulletin let us turn off people's postcount, join date and stars? (and even mod status indicator outside of the forums they mod? )
Also lets turn off sigs, avatars and disable image posting for a week.

Basically all you would see is the posters name, obviously there would still be people who know each other but it would mean in the main the responses to what people post would be purely based on the post, not the poster.

I know plenty of people will say that this is the way they act anyway, which is fine, no problem with the trial so..

Karl Hungus

copacetic wrote:

it would mean in the main the responses to what people post would be purely based on the post, not the poster.

Would it? Are we hiding the username too? Because it would be a sad individual indeed who'd reply a person's avatar or post count, rather than the actual post itself.

I do believe we've hidden post counts in the past, and it's done nothing.

Gary ITR

not a bad idea, in fact it would be good if mods only show up as mods in their own forums, if the software allowed this of course

Irish Wolf

Onkle wrote:

it would be good if mods only show up as mods in their own forums

But that's all they are - mods in their own forums... users everywhere else.

copacetic

Karl Hungus wrote:

Would it? Are we hiding the username too? Because it would be a sad individual indeed who'd reply a person's avatar or post count, rather than the actual post itself.

I do believe we've hidden post counts in the past, and it's done nothing.

well it probably won't but you never know. Not to be too obtuse but how can you tell it did nothing exactly? How would you measure the results? I've seen plenty of posts where people claim they are unaffected by prior knowledge or 'status' of posters, but imo they are denying human nature.

In my opinion all replies are coloured by what you may or may not know about the poster, conciously or not.

Ideally we would hide usernames too if that could be done with only the mod of a forum was able to see the posters name and only on their forums.

Any links to when it was done previously? As I said I'm sure it has but I couldn't find anything with a search..

Thrill

Karl Hungus wrote:

Are we hiding the username too?

Now that would be really interesting.

copacetic

Irish Wolf wrote:

But that's all they are - mods in their own forums... users everywhere else.

but they show up as 'mods' in other forums and there is a mod list at the bottom of each forum anyway. The 'mod: #forum' under people's username is not really needed on any forum imo.

Ruu_Old

The only thread I can remember about post counts was this hilarious result, more here. It was brought upon by some users proposing a -1 postcount forum. There was little or no difference when users went about their business knowing that they were down a few thousand posts as far as I can remember. It was later changed back to the way it was.

Karl Hungus

copacetic wrote:

In my opinion all replies are coloured by what you may or may not know about the poster, conciously or not.

Not saying that's incorrect, but it's hardly related to a bit of trivia like the post count, or a person's avatar.

It would be interesting to set up a forum where everyone is annonymous, and see what happens.

Don't have any links to where the postcount thing was done before though.

Gary ITR

Irish Wolf wrote:

But that's all they are - mods in their own forums... users everywhere else.

A lot of users are intimidated by mods though, even when it's outside th mods own forum

Also a common response when a mod makes a controversial point outside their own forum is 'I'd expect more from a mod' or 'a mod should know better' etc etc

Fysh

For every advantage this would give I bet there's a disadvantage.

For example - threads in which people ask for advice on products or location-specific information; user identification allows you to search back and read about that specific person's previous post on the subject and decide whether you want to pay attention to their opinion, whereas anonymity removes that until you get to the point of recognising people by their posting styles.

Plus, well, talking to a load of anonymous strangers isn't particularly appealing. In my own experience at least I find myself more active in forums where I have gotten to know some of the regulars, either by meeting them for beers IRL or just from reading the forums long enough.

I can't imagine I'm the only person to view boards this way, although if there's enough support for it this suggestion might have interesting repercussions...

copacetic

Karl Hungus wrote:

Not saying that's incorrect, but it's hardly related to a bit of trivia like the post count, or a person's avatar.

isn't it though, isn't it??

I think it all factors in, low postcount users posts are often ignored, high postcount ones/mods/etc are often given too much weight or none at all depending on who you are and the bias of the audience.

I'm not saying it is one specific aspect of the users online persona that gives a certain reaction, but if we could hide all aspects of their online personality then people would live and die by what they say alone.

Based on the thread that Ruu has posted if we did it in a secret and in a hurry it'd be a great laugh too...

Irish Wolf

copacetic wrote:

but they show up as 'mods' in other forums and there is a mod list at the bottom of each forum anyway. The 'mod: #forum' under people's username is not really needed on any forum imo.

Like I see you're mod of Lifehacking - tbh that means absolutely nothing to me.. and I wouldn't hesitate to pull you up on inappropriate behaviour, be it in your forum or outside it..

People that get their knickers in a twist over the whole mod conspiracy really need to get a grip on boards.ie and t'internet in general..

copacetic

Irish Wolf wrote:

Like I see you're mod of Lifehacking - tbh that means absolutely nothing to me.. and I wouldn't hesitate to pull you up on inappropriate behaviour, be it in your forum or outside it..

People that get their knickers in a twist over the whole mod conspiracy really need to get a grip on boards.ie and t'internet in general..

and rightly so, but you might be a special case and everyone else may not have your good heart and solid soul. Or maybe you might even find yourself thinking a second longer before you reply to peoples posts?

The mod thing is only a small aspect of it, this isn't a 'hide the mod status thread'. It is a 'hide all aspects that can identify a user' thread.

Karl Hungus

copacetic wrote:

I think it all factors in, low postcount users posts are often ignored, high postcount ones/mods/etc are often given too much weight or none at all depending on who you are and the bias of the audience.

I don't think that's true, I mean, lots of new users have cropped up on the film board and offered very interesting first posts, moreso perhaps than people with larger post counts. I don't think a username gathers more attention than say, a thread title for example. I mean, if someone started a thread about Nicolas Cage, I wouldn't be all that interested, but if someone started a thread about Takeshi Kitano, I'd snap to attention.

In either situation, a person's postcount wouldn't even come into it. I wouldn't look at the thread about Kitano and check the user's postcount before making up my mind as to whether or not I'll be enthusiastic about it. Neither would a long term user make me any more enthused with a thread about the latest Keanu Reaves film.

I really think it's what we say that's given the most weight.

Irish Wolf

copacetic wrote:

everyone else may not have your good heart and solid soul.

Me no have no heart or soul.. but on occasion I have a little small tiny wee bit of cop-on..

copacetic

Karl Hungus wrote:

I don't think that's true, I mean, lots of new users have cropped up on the film board and offered very interesting first posts, moreso perhaps than people with larger post counts. I don't think a username gathers more attention than say, a thread title for example. I mean, if someone started a thread about Nicolas Cage, I wouldn't be all that interested, but if someone started a thread about Takeshi Kitano, I'd snap to attention.

In either situation, a person's postcount wouldn't even come into it. I wouldn't look at the thread about Kitano and check the user's postcount before making up my mind as to whether or not I'll be enthusiastic about it. Neither would a long term user make me any more enthused with a thread about the latest Keanu Reaves film.

I really think it's what we say that's given the most weight.

Well I'm not saying this isn't true, and again maybe you are a special case and can rise above the rest of us! Or maybe you are fooling not just us, but yourself??

Either way, I'd like to try it and see what happened. It's a trial, an experiment to test out these theories and opinions. How we would tell if anything changed or not I couldn't say at the moment, but I have some ideas.

copacetic

Irish Wolf wrote:

but on occasion I have a little small tiny wee bit of cop-on..

which can be a lot more than most people on here have.

Irish Wolf

copacetic wrote:

which can be a lot more than most people on here have.

And so be it - \/ \/ him down there suggested a universal set of rules for "new" users - why not lend your support to that thread..

I for one am a fan of the stupidity filter*..










*until it catches me out the next time

Karl Hungus

copacetic wrote:

Well I'm not saying this isn't true, and again maybe you are a special case and can rise above the rest of us! Or maybe you are fooling not just us, but yourself??

Well, I guess I'm just at a loss as to how well I know a user would make me have any more, or less interest in a topic that I do in general.

copacetic

Karl Hungus wrote:

Well, I guess I'm just at a loss as to how well I know a user would make me have any more, or less interest in a topic that I do in general.

well not in the topic but maybe in how you would shape your response to their opinion? Especially if you disagreed.

As I said in my first post, if people don't think it'd affect them at all then they should have no problem with the trial? I could be on my own on this, which is fine too, it's an idea, not a philosophy.

copacetic

Irish Wolf wrote:

And so be it - \/ \/ him down there suggested a universal set of rules for "new" users - why not lend your support to that thread..

well I actually think that is a good idea, but it's independent of this one.

here.from.day.1

In cases where a person is looking for help or suchlike, the post count can sometimes show how reputable the poster is. Example - If looking for help with a pc, a reponse from a person with a very high post count would generally indicate he knows what he is talking about, as opposed to somebody who has just joined and wants to mess with the OPs head. Just an opinion.

copacetic

here.from.day.1 wrote:

In cases where a person is looking for help or suchlike, the post count can sometimes show how reputable the poster is. Example - If looking for help with a pc, a reponse from a person with a very high post count would generally indicate he knows what he is talking about, as opposed to somebody who has just joined and wants to mess with the OPs head. Just an opinion.

very possibly, but it could just as well be that they don't and that the person that could have really helped you only had one previous post.

It'd be a trial, I'm not sure it'd work long term anyway for many reasons but that'd be a discussion for a later date.

Karl Hungus

copacetic wrote:

well not in the topic but maybe in how you would shape your response to their opinion? Especially if you disagreed.

I still don't see it happening. If I disagree with someone, where does post count come into it? Am I going to disgree less with someone because of a higher post count? Am I going to read a post slamming The Seven Samurai, and think "omg, I'm going to tear your post apart, point by point!" then notice a post count of 10,000 or so, and then think to myself "Um, ok, well I guess we'll agree to disagree on that one."

copacetic wrote:

As I said in my first post, if people don't think it'd affect them at all then they should have no problem with the trial? I could be on my own on this, which is fine too, it's an idea, not a philosophy.

I'm all up for setting up a new forum to run a test, in the interest of experimenting, and it could certainly be a lot of fun too. You got my vote.

copacetic

Karl Hungus wrote:

Am I going to read a post slamming The Seven Samurai, and think "omg, I'm going to tear your post apart, point by point!" then notice a post count of 10,000 or so, and then think to myself "Um, ok, well I guess we'll agree to disagree on that one."

prob not, but say you saw a post from a new user with 10 posts saying 'the only good thing about the seven samaurai was that it led to the magnificent seven which yule brenner was excellent in'

Now you may just not bother to reply, could post a succint 'rubbish' or you may give them a point by point critique of the film. Which is more likely I couldn't say. I would say that I'd feel the weighting of probability of each reply would change if the poster was a 10k postcount regular of the movie forum. Of course you might say that a 10k poster would never diss Kurosawa, but this is just an example

biko

Ruu wrote:

The only thread I can remember about post counts was this hilarious result, more here.

I remember. Funny stuff!

Karl Hungus

copacetic wrote:

prob not, but say you saw a post from a new user with 10 posts saying 'the only good thing about the seven samaurai was that it led to the magnificent seven which yule brenner was excellent in'

Now you may just not bother to reply, could post a succint 'rubbish' or you may give them a point by point critique of the film. Which is more likely I couldn't say. I would say that I'd feel the weighting of probability of each reply would change if the poster was a 10k postcount regular of the movie forum. Of course you might say that a 10k poster would never diss Kurosawa, but this is just an example

I think that's a much better example, but I've seen some serious nonses with large post counts, so I still think that wouldn't come into it.

Tar.Aldarion

Get rid of all usernames, sigs, post counts etc for a while. How interesting.

BuffyBot

copacetic wrote:

I'm sure this must have been suggested or done in the past?

Will vbulletin let us turn off people's postcount, join date and stars? (and even mod status indicator outside of the forums they mod? )
Also lets turn off sigs, avatars and disable image posting for a week.

Basically all you would see is the posters name, obviously there would still be people who know each other but it would mean in the main the responses to what people post would be purely based on the post, not the poster.

I know plenty of people will say that this is the way they act anyway, which is fine, no problem with the trial so..

Pointless effort for very little return.

I'm been on/worked with/managed forums with various combinations of the above it makes very little difference to the way people post. I think you're reading way to much into the very odd/occasional behaviours of odd/occasional users.

copacetic

BuffyBot wrote:

Pointless effort for very little return.

I'm been on/worked with/managed forums with various combinations of the above it makes very little difference to the way people post. I think you're reading way to much into the very odd/occasional behaviours of odd/occasional users.

Do you know exactly how much effort is involved? If it is doable in vbulletin, then it would be minor enough.

As for 'very little return', how do you define that? How do you define the very little difference? Any evidence?

As mentioned above I knew plenty of people would think it was a silly and/or pointless idea. If so I still don't see why you would have a problem with trying it?

Talliesin

here.from.day.1 wrote:

In cases where a person is looking for help or suchlike, the post count can sometimes show how reputable the poster is.

If people really think that then there is indeed an argument in favour of not showing post count. Some particularly disreputable posters have high post counts.

here.from.day.1 wrote:

Example - If looking for help with a pc, a reponse from a person with a very high post count would generally indicate he knows what he is talking about, as opposed to somebody who has just joined and wants to mess with the OPs head. Just an opinion.

Or that they posted 8,000 posts on AH and have just discovered that we have a forum about PCs?

We had a very high postcount troll for a while who was forever posting "helpful" advice on technical matters that was deeply clueless (it's still not clear whether that was part of their trolling or they were just clueless - my guess is they were clueless but knew they were clueless and hence it was a relatively subtle troll like much of the rest of their trolling, which was part of the reason they lasted so long).

We did indeed experiment with post-count settings for a while. It did indeed have very little effect.

The arguments above seem to fall into the following three groups:

1. Status is bad.
2. Status is good.
3. Status is good but people are taking the wrong things as clues towards someone's status.

I think the third argument is correct, but I also think it's impossible to stop. People will always be looking for cues as to how much weight they can give an opinion and people will always get it wrong a lot of the time. Really, there's little point removing something that's just a fun little piece of trivia about a user just because it's yet another thing people will give inappropriate weight to. People will just find something else.

Once someone has actually been around boards for any length of time they will begin to form positive and negative opinions about users based on their own values and apply them appropriately. This is how it should be - you should pay more attention to someone who seems to be of like mind to you or admirable in some way.

Post-count fetishism is something smart users will quickly grow out of. Similarly with the mod tags. Sure persistently stupid people will focus on it disproportionally but persistently stupid people will always do stupid things and dealing with them should be a matter of necessary damage control followed by ignoring them.

Crucifix

I think it probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but more importantly, I don't think it'd make a clearly noticable difference. If you do a trial run are you really going to be able to analyse it at the end?
Other than that, sure why not give it a go. That period where everyone's postcounts went mad was a good laugh.

copacetic

Talliesin wrote:

Post-count fetishism is something smart users will quickly grow out of. Similarly with the mod tags. Sure persistently stupid people will focus on it disproportionally but persistently stupid people will always do stupid things and dealing with them should be a matter of necessary damage control followed by ignoring them.

Well again, I'd agree with this. The experiment could be a way to help us determine how many boardsies fit into the category of 'smart users', it could be us all, or a small minority.

I have yet to see any argument for not trying this again except that some peoples opinion is that it won't make a difference. An attitude which would have prevented any worthwhile discovery of the 19th and 20th century!

I'm sure all of you from a scientific or sociological/physchology background would jump at the chance to try such an experiment to actually discover if this is true. As I said above this isn't a philosophy, it's a trial to actually discover and measure the results. I'm of the opinion that there would be at least some affects, and I have yet to see anyone disagree. If they are significant and measurable or not (and how to do so) would be part of the trial results.

petes

But then how would we recognise pighead from his anonymous posts?

copacetic

Crucifix wrote:

I think it probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but more importantly, I don't think it'd make a clearly noticable difference. If you do a trial run are you really going to be able to analyse it at the end?
Other than that, sure why not give it a go. That period where everyone's postcounts went mad was a good laugh.

well this is were I do see the problem with trying it. How to tell?!
It's also where I disagree with some posters who say it makes no difference without any evidence to back up their position.

I'm open to ideas but I'd be looking for empirical evidence with admin help. If we trialed it for a week that should give us a decent sample size of post traffic, ave post length, reported posts, bannings, posts/user, posts/forum etc etc.

This could then be compared to other weeks to look for any changes, maybe low post count users started posting more and longer. etc etc. Perhaps the tech forums would have a lot less posts when people don't have postcount to judge merit on. Maybe reported posts would shoot up, but bannings wouldn't as people report more freely but people haven't actual done anything more wrong that usual. Or perhaps bannings would go up.

Who is to say without trying, results would be very hard to judge without actual evidence imo. 'Very little would change' is meaningless imo.

jester77

I was going to reply saying that it wouldn't make a differnence but I'm slightly humbled by your superior post count

copacetic

petes wrote:

But then how would we recognise pighead from his anonymous posts?

another special case worthy of noting, maybe we all think pighead is a god because we give him the benefit of the doubt. would his posts stand up to scrutiny on there own, without his rep behind them?

copacetic

jester77 wrote:

I was going to reply saying that it wouldn't make a differnence but I'm slightly humbled by your superior post count

you've been here much longer though! perhaps your lower posts/day means you contribute higher quality?

(but did I mention I was here back in the day and returned after a few years with a forgotten user id? curse my memory, I could have been a contender)

jester77

copacetic wrote:

you've been here much longer though! perhaps your lower posts/day means you contribute higher quality?

That would depend on us agreeing on what the definition of quality is, but I would consider some of my posts in the BG&RH forum as quality

jhegarty

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

Get rid of all usernames, sigs, post counts etc for a while. How interesting.

why not go the whole hog...

"Delete * From Boards"

Sangre

Of course a large post count makes a difference, it gives you the benefit of the doubt.

God knows many of my posts would have got me banned if I had been a poster regged for a month with only 10 posts.

AlmightyCushion

petes wrote:

But then how would we recognise pighead from his anonymous posts?

He speaks in the third person and calls everyone a cnut in pretty much everypost he makes. It wouldn't be that hard.

@jester77 - Good old beerguts. That forum is nothing but quality and I suggest you agree or the strike team will be informed.