Originally posted by ainwood
This is exactly why it should be hidden! It encourages people to make judgements on what people are posting not by content, but based solely on a metric that indicates peoples propensity to post: more indicative of how much time they have on their hands than on insight and knowledge (please note that I am not implying that they are mutually exclusive).
As an example, (without mentioning specific names), there are four or five people who I regard as excellent Civ3 players, who have an intimate knowledge of the game strategies and mechanics. Yet they have very low postcounts.
I agree, postcount has nothing to do with how much people know about civ. But when I first came here, I made my judgments based on both postcount AND content. For example, I remember I was able to tell the difference between two 2000 postcount forum users, one was very experienced in Civ I could tell, and the other plays civ every once in a while but was just as inexperienced as I was. But I was able to tell that both forum users spent a long time here at CFC, the former posts less but longer ones, as I was able to tell by his regristration date, and the other posts a lot but more irrevelant.
When lurking, I take everything into account. I do not just look at postcount and say "Oh, this guy has 3000 posts so he must know everything he's talking about." I look at content, I look at postcount, I look at regristration date, I look at where they're posting specifically, and I also look at who responds to them. I am able to tell that if someone has 200 posts, registered for a year (when I was first here), but knew a lot about civ, then that person spends more time playing Civ than spending time here at CFC. Would I have been able to figure that out without postcount? Yes, but it would have taken me another month, and I'm not an archivist; I don't record everybody's post and see who is who.
One great example is GameFAQs. Instead of postcount, they have this different, if slightly flawed, system called "karma" which is gained by at least one post per day. Every deleted message gets detracted from karma. However, I rarely look at karma, because a) unregistered users can't view it, b) it's hidden in the profile, and c) it means nothing as a person could post something like "LOL" once a day and could have the same amount of karma as somebody who posts long rants like this one. But as a result, I rarely ever see names anymore. I only see them temporarily if I'm replying to them, or we're in the middle of a debate, or they post very, very frequently and have a distinct style in their posts. Also it's partly because there's no avatars there, but still, I actually find myself recognizing people by their sigs rather than their avatars. I only look at content to judge people, but I end up judging only a few people who have distinct posts (ie trolls or people I debate with). As a result, it took me a year lurking at GameFAQs before I finally registered, and I can only name ten or so people off the top of my head from there, even though there are twice as many posters (both inactive and active) than here. But here I can name a ton of people. It's not just because of avatars, it's not just because of postcount, and it's not just because of a regristration date. It's because of the combination of all of these elements that it makes it so easy to recognize older people and identify new ones.
We know have three posters with 10,000 posts. 
