But who do you feel participates more: someone who writes a thousand ten-word replies, or someone who writes a hundred thousand-word replies?
This is an old, old argument and it's beside the point.
Take TrekBBS for an example. I've been there since 2007, and my contributions have ranged from mindless fluff in the 3/5/7-word stories and the Shouting Spock thread (cooleddie74 and I actually had a little story going in that one for a few posts... all in capital letters, of course) to informative posts about the Dune Encyclopedia that were so long that I had to split them up over three different posts... and that was
after cutting out what I considered extraneous.
The word stories and Shouting Spock stuff and the Star Trek Hangman game in the Admirals' Lounge (unless you're either solving the phrase or hosting it, your posts consist of one single letter) are what I consider the fun contributions. Posts in the Dune thread are where I can draw on decades' worth of knowledge, reading, and study and recollections of the fan feud that was carried on over half a dozen Dune forums and social media (MySpace was where we did stuff back then). Other stuff is discussion, like anywhere.
All of that is my contribution to that site. It's the same here, no matter if it's a joke, a picture, answering someone's questions about cats, hosting Iron Pen, posting in Site Feedback, posting in the Civ forums (I still do that occasionally), talking about serious and non-serious stuff in the serial threads... it's all part of my contribution to this site, and I would like all of it to be counted.
The matter of high vs low is the reason our post count is only visible in our accounts at TrekBBS. But access to the various Lounges (if you're not a Premium member) is controlled by your post count. I could have had access to the Admirals' Lounge a long time before I actually started posting there. The reason I didn't take advantage is because I would have essentially bought my rank. As I told them when I got there, I waited until I had the requisite post count, to do it honestly and fairly. And that's not even the top tier of the Admiralty. It's going to take years at my rate of posting there to get to 16,000 and my next promotion.
If you are offering up other ways of tracking our progress, I'm all for it. I'd love to see wordcount next to postcount.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen and postcount is a close enough proxy. Most posts are not 1000 words long. And most spammers/trolls drop out before hitting 10,000, reinforcing it's utility as a rough metric.
I once saw someone make 10,000 posts in a single year, gaining the rank of Emperor (a big deal on that forum, as in all the time I was there, only four men and one woman had reached that rank... all of them wrote excellent promotion stories of how they became Emperor/Empress). It took two years for me to reach Queen, and I was the fourth woman to get to that point. That forum also granted access to hidden forums and a few other perks based on post count.
It's basically a way to measure one's own progress and evidence that something is being produced.
But I really don't understand why tracking progress is necessary at all? I don't get what it proves ... like would you consider yourself more valuable than say Aimee, because you have more posts than she does?
It's not a question of who is more valuable. It's like word count in NaNoWriMo. I don't consider myself more "valuable" (being a person with over 50,000 words and a winner's badge and t-shirt) than someone who made 1000 words and got writer's block. I've been in that person's shoes, and know how frustrating it is. But in both cases, it's better than zero (and I've been there as well). In NaNoWriMo you're not competing with other people. You're competing with yourself.
It's the same on forums. On sites where post count matters, I have a goal I want to reach, preferably by some specific future date, and try to get there with good posts that contribute to whatever discussion I'm part of. I'm not into very much fluff posting anymore, which is why it took over 10 years to make the lowest tier of the Admiralty. I didn't spam my way there.
